Diary of a Drug Fiend

Au Pays de Cocaine 59 will go a bit further than that. I don’t believe the greatest artist in the world could invent what we felt, and if he could he couldn’t describe it. I’m trying to describe it myself, and I feel that I’m not making out very well. Come to think of it, the English language has its limitations. When mathemati- cians and men of science want to exchange thoughts, English isn’t much good. They've had to invent new words, new symbols. Look at Einstein’s equations. I knew a man once that knew James Hinton, who invented the fourth dimension. Pretty bright chap, he was, but Hinton thought, on the most ordinary subjects, at least six times as fast as he did, and when it came to Hinton’s explaining himself, he simply couldn’t do it. That’s the great trouble when a new thinker comes along. They all moan that they can’t understand him ; the fact annoys them very much ; and ten to one they persecute him and call him an Atheist or a Degenerate or a Pro-German or a Bolshevik, or whatever the favourite term of abuse happens to be at the time. Wells told us a bit about this in that book of his about giants, and so does Bernard Shaw in his Back to Methuselah. It’s nobody’s fault in particular, but there it is, and you can’t get over it. And here was I, a perfectly ordinary man, with just about the average allowance of brains, suddenly finding myself cut off from the world, in a class by myself— I felt that I had something perfectly tremendous to tell, but I couldn't tell even myself what it was. And there was Lou standing right opposite, and I recognised instinctively, by sympathy, that she was just in the same place. We had no need of communicating with each other ’ by means of articulate speech. We understood perfectly ; we expressed the fact in every subtle harmony of glance and gesture. The world had stopped suddenly still. We were alone in the night and the silence of things. We