Diary of a Drug Fiend

The Voice of Virtue 285 natural or unnatural. Lamus has since told me that the true test of the perversity of a pleasure is that it occupies a disproportionate amount of the attention. According to him, we have no right to decide off- hand that it is an unnatural pleasure to eat sawdust. A man might be constituted so that he liked it. And as long as his peculiarity doesn’t damage or interfere with other people, there’s no reason why he shouldn’t be left alone. But if it is the man’s fixed belief that sawdust eating is essential to human happiness ; if he attributes almost everything that happens either to the effects of eating it or not eating it ; if he imagines that most of the people he meets are also sawdust-eaters, and above all, if he thinks that the salvation of the world depends entirely upon making laws to compel people to eat sawdust, whether they like it or not, then it is fair to say that his mind is unbalanced on the subject ; and that, further, the practice itself, however innocent it may appear, is in that particular case perverse. Sanity consists in the proper equilibrium of ideas in general. Thatis the only sense in which it is true that genius is connected with insanity. The conviction of Michael Angelo that his work was the most important thing in the Renaissance was not quite sane, even although in a way time has justified his belief. That is what is wrong with the majority of vaccina- tionists and anti-vaccinationists and vegetarians and anarchists and the “ irascible race of seers ’’ in general, that they over-play their hands. However right they are in their belief, and in thinking that belief important, they are wrong in forgetting the equal or greater importance of other things. The really important things in the world are the huge silent inexorable things. “What are the wild waves saying ? ’’—that the pull of the tides is gradually slowing down the earth’s rate of rotation. And that was what was wrong with me. I had a tendency to see heroin everywhere.