Diary of a Drug Fiend

344 The Diary of a Drug Fiend mind, but the chain of causes is sufficiently obvious now.” I had never taken kindly to medicine. Its unscientific procedure, its arrogance, its snobbishness, and its empiricism all combined to disgust me. I had simply gone to the hospital because my father was bent on it, and wouldn’t put up the money for anything else. I wanted to be an engineer. I was keen as mustard on bicycles and automobiles. Even as a boy I had had a sort of workshop of my own. The greatest pleasure of my childhood had been the rare visits to my mother’s father, who in his time had been a great inventor and done an immense amount of work relative to the mechanical perfection of railway travelling. When the war broke out I had gone straight to the engineering shops; and I became a flying man rather against my will, on account of my weight and the dearth of pilots. I broke off in my enthusiastic harangue, because King Lamus had stopped on the crest of the ridge which divided the strangers’ house at the Abbey from the main buildings. “The climb has put you out of breath,” he said. “ Take a sniff of this; it will put you all right in a second.” I pushed the man’s hand away impatiently, and the little heap of powder fell to the ground. “‘ Oh, it’s like that, is it?’ said Basil laughing. I realised how rude I had been, and began to apologise. “ That’s all right,’’ he said. ‘‘ But, of course, you aren’t going to get out of it as easily as that. You don’t give up eating mutton because you ate too much one day and got indigestion. You'll find heroin pretty useful when you know how to use it. However, your gesture just now was automatic. It was evidence that your unconscious or true will objects to your taking heroin. So far so good for the negative side. But the question is, what does your true will actually want you to do in a positive way?”