Diary of a Drug Fiend

252 The Diary of a Drug Fiend We are playing a. game of chess in which nobody can see more than two or three squares at once, and so it has become impossible to form a coherent plan. King Lamus is trying to train a number of selected people to act as a sort of brain for the world in its present state of cerebral collapse. He is teaching them to co-ordinate the facts in a higher synthesis. The suggestion is that of his old teacher, Prof. Henry Mauds- ley, with whom he studied insanity. Herbert Spencer, too, had a similar idea. But King Lamus is the first to endeavour to make a practical effort to embody this conception in a practical way. I seem to have wandered a long way from our fare- well dinner party; but my mind is still unable to -concentrate as it should. Heroin and cocaine enable one to attain a high degree of concentration artificially, and this has to be paid for by a long period of reaction in which one cannot fix one’s mind on a subject at all. I am very much better than I was, but I get impatient at times. It is so tedious to build oneself up on biological lines, especially when one knows that a -single dose of heroin or even morphine would make one instantly the equal of the greatest minds in the world. a [~~ We had decided to take the prussic acid in our coffee. I do not think we were afraid of death ; life had become such an infinitely boring alternation between a period of stimulation which failed to stimulate and of depression which hardly even depressed. There was no object in going on. It was simply not worth while. On the other hand, there was a certain hesitation about stopping because of the effort required. We felt that even to die required energy. We tried to supply this with Dutch courage, and we even succeeded in producing a sort of hilarity. We never had a moment’s doubt about carrying out our programme. The waiter brought two Péches Melba; and as he retired we found that King Lamus was standing at our table. |