The True Will 339
really, after all, expressed in Ecclesiastes, “ Vanity,
vanity, all is vanity!”
My relations with Lou herself were poisoned by the
same feeling. The improvement in our physical health,
and the intoxicating effect of the climate and the
surroundings urged us to take part in the pageant of
nature. Yet against all such ideas we could not help
but hear the insistent voice of Haidee Lamoureux,
that the end of all these things is death. She had
deliberately renounced existence as futile, and there
was no answer to her pleadings.
Besides this, my mind had eaten up its pabulum.
I had literally nothing to think of except heroin, and
I discovered that heroin appealed to me behind all
veils, as being an escape from life.
A man who has once experienced the drug-life finds
it difficult to put up with the inanity of normal existence.
He has become wise with the wisdom of despair.
The Big Lion and Sister Athena exhausted their
ingenuity in finding things with which I might occupy
_ my weary aimless hours. But nothing seemed to get
me out of the fixed idea that life was heroin with
intervals that did not count.
For about a week King Lamus tried to get me out
of my groove by giving me cocaine, and asking me to
employ my time by writing an account of my adventures
from the time when I began to take it. The drug
stimulated me immensely ; and I was quite enthusiastic
for the time. I wrote the story of my adventures from
the night of my meeting Lou to our return to England
from Naples.
But when the episode was over, I found the old
despair of life as strong as ever. The will to live was
really dead in me.
But two evenings later King Lamus came to smoke
a pipe with me on the terrace at sunset. In his hand
was the Paradiso record which I had written. Sister
Athena had typed it.
‘““ My dear man,” he said, “ what I can’t see is why