Diary of a Drug Fiend

King Lamus Intervenes 251 I am therefore extremely depressed by the obligation under which King Lamus has put me to write this section, with the avowed object of instructing the world in the methods of overcoming the craving for drugs. He admits frankly that he feels it quite useless to do it himself, for the very reason that he is so abnormal a man. He even distrusts me, on the ground that he has had so much influence on my life and thought. “Even a mediocrity like yourself, Sir Peter,” he said to me the other day, “ dull as you are, cannot be trusted in my neighbourhood. Your brain unconsciously soaks up the highly charged particles of my atmosphere. And before you know where you are, instead of expres- sing yourself—what little self you have to express—you will be repeating, in a debased currency, the words of wisdom that from time to time have dropped from my refined lips.”’ There was a time when I should have resented a remark like that. If I don’t do so now, it isn’t because I’ve lost my manhood, it isn’t because I feel such gratitude to the man who pulled me through ; the reason is that I have learned what he means when he talks like that. He has completely killed out in himself the idea of himself. He takes no credit for his marvellous qualities, and has even got over kicking himself for his weaknesses. And so he says the most serious things in the language of absurdity and irony. And when he talks in a serious strain, his language merely accentuates the prodigious sense of humour which, as he says himself, saves him from going insane with horror at the mess into which humanity has got itself. Just as the Roman Empire began to break down when it became universal, when it was so large that no individual mind could grasp the problems which it postulated, so to-day, the spread of vulgar education and the development of facilities for transport have got ahead of the possibilities of the best minds. The increase of knowledge has forced the thinker to specialise, with the result that there is nobody capable to deal with civilisation as a whole.