238 The Diary of a Drug Fiend
Weltschmertz; the universal SOITOW wherein “ Creation
groaneth and travaileth until now.’
I understood Basil’s wish that we should undertake
the fearful experiment which had brought us to such
extremity. My insanity had been the result of my
selfish vanity. I was not singled out for a unique
destiny. The realisation of my own suffering had led
me to understand that every one else was in the same
boat. I could see even the false note of the contempt
of the poet for those who had not experienced his own
sublimity of horror.
“And you, you puritan others,
Who have missed the morphia craving,
Cry scorn if I call you brothers,
Curl lip at my maniac raving,
Fools, seven times beguiled,
You have not known her? Well!
There was never a need she smiled
To harry you into hell!”
The pride of Satan, in the deepness of damnation,
has a fall when he realises that others are in a same
calamity—without having been at such perverse pains
to get there. He only attains the truth when he becomes
wholly impersonal, in the final paragraph.
** Morphia is but one
Spark of its secular fire.
She is the single sun—
Type of all desire !
All that you would you are—
And that is the crown of a craving.
You are slaves of the wormwood star.
Analysed, reason is Taving..
Feeling, examined, is pain.
What heaven were to hope for a doubt of it!
Life is anguish, insane;
And death is—not a way out of it!”