THE HASHEESH EATER
I myself became insane, and leaping up and down, mimicked
them all, and drank their demented spirit.
Hasheesh is indeed an accursed drug, and the soul at last
pays a most bitter price for all its ecstasies; moreover, the
use of it is not the proper means of gaining any insight, yet
who shall say that at that season of exaltation I did not know
things as they are more truly than ever in the ordinary state?
Let us not assert that the half-careless and uninterested way
in which we generally look on nature is the normal mode of
the soul’s power of vision. There is a fathomless meaning,
an intensity of delight in all our surroundings, which our eyes
must be unsealed to see. In the jubilance of hasheesh, we
have only arrived by an improper pathway at the secret of
that infinity of beauty which shall be beheld in heaven and
earth when the veil of the corporeal drops off, and we know
as we are known. Then from the muddy waters of our life,
defiled by the centuries of degeneracy through which they
have flowed, we shall ascend to the old-time original fount,
and grow rapturous with its apocalyptic draught.
I do not remember whether I have yet mentioned that in
the hasheesh state an occasional awaking occurs, perhaps as
often as twice in an hour (though I have no way of judging
accurately, from the singular properties of the hasheesh time),
when the mind returns for an exceedingly brief space to
perfect consciousness, and views all objects in their familiar
light.
Awaking on the morrow after a succession of vague and
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