Diary of a Drug Fiend

First Mid 277 Lamus laughed merrily. “Good for you, kid, very much to the point ! . “T’ve wandered a good deal through queer parts of the world, as you know, and in some of those places there are still taboos about eating and hunting and fishing—all sorts of things which we in England take quite simply, in consequence of which they give no trouble. “ But where a man has to think of a thousand things before he has his dinner: what he eats, and how it was killed, and who cooked it, and so on for ever and ever, he gets no chance to develop his mind in more important ways. Taboo is responsible for the low mental and moral development of the peoples whom it afflicts, more than anything else. An appetite should be satisfied in the simplest and easiest way. Once you begin to worry about the right and wrong of it, you disturb the mind unnaturally, and begin to think awry in all sorts of ways that have apparently nothing to do with it. “ Think of the Queen of Spain who was being dragged by her horse, and lost her life because of the absence of the official appointed by etiquette to assist her to dismount |” We all laughed ; the girls frankly, but I with an ill- defined, uncomfortable feeling that Lamus was getting on to dangerous ground. “What is modern fiction?” he asked, ‘ from Hardy and Dostoevski to the purveyors of garbage to servant girls, but an account of the complications set up by the exaggerated importance attached by themselves or their neighbours to the sexual appetites of two or more bimanous monkeys. ““ Most sexual troubles and offences so-called would do very little harm if nobody attached any importance to what was or was not going on.” Of course, there is an answer to this type of argument ; but I don’t know what it is. I felt very uneasy. He was laying his axe to the root of the tree of civilisation. That was evident: