Diary of a Drug Fiend

A Heroin Heroine 69 was a certain fascination in her complete lack of fascination. Please excuse this paradoxical way of putting it. I mean that she had all the qualities which normally attract. She had the remains of an astonishing, if bizarre, beauty. She had obviously a vast wealth of experience. She possessed a quiet intensity which should have made her irresistible; and yet she was absolutely devoid of what we call magnetism. It isn’t a scientific word—so much the worse for science. It describes a fact in nature, and one of the most important facts in practical affairs. Everything of human interest, from music-hall turns to empires, is run on magnetism and very little else. And science ignores it because it can’t be measured by mechanical instruments| The whole of the woman’s vitality was directed to some secret interior shrine of her own soul. Now she began to speak for the first time. The only subject that interested her in this wide universe was heroin. Her voice was monotonous. Lou told me later that it reminded her of a dirge droned by Tibetan monks far off across implacable snow. “It’s the only thing there is,” she said, in a tone of extraordinary ecstatic detachment. One could divine an infinite unholy joy derived from its own sadness. It was as if she took a morbid pleasure in being some- thing melancholy, something monstrous; there was, in fact, a kind of martyred majesty in her mood. “You mustn’t expect to get the result at once,” she went on. ‘“‘ You have to be born into it, married with it, and dead from it before you understand it.: Different people are different. But it always takes some months at least before you get rid of that stupid nuisance—life. As long as you have animal passions, you are an animal. How disgusting it is to think of eating and loving and all those appetities, like cattle | Breathing itself would be beastly if one knew one were doing it. How intolerable life would be to people of