The Hashish Eater quotes

I could not doubt it.

I was in the power of the hashish influence. My first emotion was one of uncontrollable terror⁠—a sense of getting something which I had not bargained for.

That moment I would have given all I had or hoped to have to be as I was three hours before.

I had entered upon a tremendous life which they could not share. If the disembodied ever return to hover over the hearthstone which once had a seat for them, they look upon their friends as I then looked upon mine.

A nearness of place, with an infinite distance of state, a connection which had no possible sympathies for the wants of that hour of revelation, an isolation none the less perfect for seeming companionship.

Still I spoke, a question was put to me, and I answered it; I even laughed at a bon mot. Yet it was not my voice which spoke; perhaps one which I once had far away in another time and another place.

The impulse seized me to look again. The minute-hand stood halfway between fifteen and sixteen minutes past eleven. The watch must have stopped; I held it to my ear; no, it was still going.

I had traveled through all that immeasurable chain of dreams in thirty seconds.

“My God!” I cried, “I am in eternity.” In the presence of that first sublime revelation of the soul’s own time, and her capacity for an infinite life, I stood trembling with breathless awe.

Till I die, that moment of unveiling will stand in clear relief from all the rest of my existence. I hold it still in unimpaired remembrance as one of the unutterable sanctities of my being.

The years of all my earthly life to come can never be as long as those thirty seconds.

Finally the servant reappeared. I received my powder and went home.

… which I had been conscious had seemed to satisfy every human want, physical or spiritual, I smiled on the four plain white walls of my bedchamber, and hailed their familiar unostentatiousness with a pleasure which had no wish to transfer itself to arabesque or rainbows.

It was like returning home from an eternity spent in loneliness among the palaces of strangers.

Well may I say an eternity, for during the whole day I could not rid myself of the feeling that I was separated from the preceding one by an immeasurable lapse of time. In face, I never got wholly rid of it.

memory could not efface the traces of my having passed through a great mystery. I recalled the events of the past night, and was pleased to think that I had betrayed myself to no one but Dr. H. I was satisfied with my experiment.

Ah! would that I had been satisfied! Yet history must go on.

It was one of those evenings when the universal sense of balminess makes all outdoors as homelike and delicious as the cheeriest winter fireside can be, with its enlivenment of ruddy blaze, and its charm of sheltered privacy.

The very soul seems turned inside out for an airing, and we are almost ashamed of ourselves forever preferring rafters to the sky, and fleeing from the presence of Nature to find a home.

Through all the streets that ran toward the west the sun was sending a thrill of light from his goodbye place on the horizon, and the pavements were a mosaic of dancing leaf-shadows and golden polygons, forever shifting as the trees quivered over us in …

I cast off all restraint; I leaped into the air; I clapped my hands, and shouted for joy. An involuntary exclamation raised the mustache of the poet beside me. “What in the world,” he cried, “is the matter with you?”

I could only answer, “Bliss! bliss! unimagined bliss!”

In an instant he saw all, for he knew my former experience, and as quickly formed the resolution of humoring me to the utmost in all my vagaries.

The younger thirst for adventure was quenched by rapid degrees as I found it possible to ascend Chimborazo with Humboldt lying on a sofa, or chase hartebeests with Cumming over muffins and coffee.

The only exceptions to this state of imaginative indolence were the hours spent in rowing or sailing upon the most glorious river of the world

, and the consciousness that the Hudson rolled at my own door only contributed to settle the conviction that there was no need of going abroad to find beauties in which the soul might wrap itself as in a garment of delight.

… and the blades turned full to the wind, have I sat and drifted for hours through mountain-shadows, and past glimpses of light that flooded the woody gorges, with a sense of dreamy ecstasy which all the novelties of a new world could never have supplied.

Oh, most noble river, what hast thou not been to me?

In childhood thy ripples were the playmates of my perpetual leisure, dancing up the sandy stretches of thy brink, and telling laughing tales of life’s beamy spray and sunshine.

The blowing out of a candle can set an unfathomed barathrum wide agape beneath the flower-wreathed table of his feast, and convert his palace of sorcery into a Golgotha.

Light is a necessity to him, even when sleeping; it must tinge his visions, or they assume a hue as sombre as the banks of Styx.

I do not know how long a time had passed since midnight, when I awoke suddenly to find myself in a realm of the most perfect clarity of view, yet terrible with an infinitude of demoniac shadows. Perhaps, I thought, I am still dreaming;

No glass for me! I snatched the pitcher, and drank a Niagara of refreshment with every draught. I reveled in the ecstasy of a drinker of the rivers of al-Firdaus.

Hashish always brings with it an awakening of perception which magnifies the smallest sensation till it occupies immense boundaries.

The hashish-eater who drinks during his highest state of exaltation almost invariably supposes that he is swallowing interminable floods, and imagines his throat an abyss which is becoming gorged by the sea.

Your critic, who aims altogether at uses comprehended in bread, meat, and broadcloth, may ask, “If it be so, of what practical utility would it be to discover it?” A sufficient answer lies in the fact that men would know one more truth.

A truth tested and established may lie for centuries, mildewed and rusted, in the armory of knowledge, until some great soul comes along, draws it out of the rubbish, buckles it on, rushes into the conflict, and with it pries open the portals of one more promised land of blessing for the human race.

Gunpowder is a truth; wise men sneer at the monk’s obstreperous plaything. The years float calmly on;

To me all joys were real—yes, even with a reality which utterly surpasses the hardest facts of the ordinary world.

Hashish 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?

Then I stayed myself upon the hope, and grew into calm endurance.

We may depend upon it, we have not read the world within or the world without.

Some mystic wind, like that of hashish, now and then just flutters the leaves of those shut books as it passes by, and the gleam of the divine characters for an instant ravishes us.

Repeatedly have I wandered past doors and houses which, in my ordinary condition, were as well known as my own, and have at last given up the search for them in utter hopelessness, recognizing not the faintest familiar trace in their aspect.

Certainly, a hashish eater should never be alone.

I found Sidney in his room: in his charge Sam left me, after apprising him of my state, and I easily persuaded him to go with me on my travels.

It is therefore the case that, wherever this drug comes into contact with a sensitive organization, the same fruit of supernatural beauty or horror will characterize the visions produced.

It is hashish which makes both the Syrian and the Saxon Oriental.

That this hypothesis is more than mere vagary, it appears to me, may be proved by numerous parallels running through other nations than the Eastern.

… the time of the final awaking comes, the resurrection of the soul from its charnel in the body, the analytic finger of inevitable light shall search out that old inscription, and to the spiritual eye no deep-graven record of its earthly triumphs shall be clearer.

The benumbing influences of the body protect us here from much of remorse and retrospective pining.

Its weight lies heavily upon the inner sense, and deadens it to perception of multitudes of characters which, to be read, require acutest powers of discernment. When the body is removed, the barrier to the Past goes also.

I was drawn toward them by an irresistible impulse, for sculpture and architecture had reached, in that city, the highest ideal of art. I thought of the hero, and seemed to share the glory of his triumph.

Then out of the borders of the dense wood from which I had just emerged came a hot and hissing whisper, “Kill thyself! kill thyself!”

Shuddering, I turned to see who spoke. No one was visible. Again, with still intenser earnestness, the whisper was repeated; and now unseen tongues syllabled it on all sides and in the air above me.

We perceive the correspondence of two sensations, but, by an instantaneous process, give the second one a wrong position in the succession of experiences.

The soul is regarded as the historian when she is in reality the sibyl

; but the misconception takes place in such a microscopic portion of time that detection is impossible.

… which, at its time, had seemed to die away in the thought, and lo, in all the years since then it had been ceaselessly waving onward in consecutive circles, whose outer rim touched and invaded the majestic symphony of unalterable principles of Beauty and Truth.

Before the presence of that beholding there was no such thing as a little wrong in all the universe.

And now, in review, there passed before my mind all those paradoxes of being which, to our natural sense, forever perplex the relations between God and Man—God, the omnipotent; Man, the free agent, the two concentric wheels of self-determining will which turn the universe.

… I was lifted entirely out of the world of hitherto conceivable being, and invested with the power of beholding forms and modes of existence which, on earth, are impossible to be expressed, for the reason that no material emblems exist which even faintly foreshadow them.

Among men we communicate entirely by symbols.

Upon any thought which has not its symbol in the Outer, “untransferable” is stamped indelibly. A certain relation between two thoughts is beheld by one human mind. How shall the man inform his neighbor of this relation?

Now in hashish it is utterly violated.

In the hashish-eater a virtual change of worlds has taken place, through the preternatural scope and activity of all his faculties.

Truth has not become expanded, but his vision has grown telescopic; that which others see only as the dim nebula, or do not see at all, he looks into with a penetrating scrutiny which distance, to a great extent, can not evade.

… soul is sometimes plainly perceived to be but one in its own sensorium, while the body is understood to be all that so variously modifies impressions as to make them in the one instance smell, in another taste, another sight, and thus on, ad finem.

Thus the hashish-eater knows what it is to be burned by salt fire, to smell colors, to see sounds, and, much more frequently, to see feelings.

How often do I remember vibrating in the air over a floor bristling with red-hot needles, and, although I never supposed I came in contact with them, feeling the sensation of their frightful pungency through sight as distinctly as if they were entering my heart.

Most ingeniously do they fabricate supposititious purposes for outer things; hopelessly writhe in the folds of perplexity when, with all their far-fetched hypotheses, they can not see what material good is to come out of some obstinate resistant to their analysis.

Blind philosophers! Nature refuses to cramp herself within your impossible law; she rejects your generalization; she throws off the shackles of your theory!

For the sake of mere physical well-being, it had doubtless been far better that never a centipede had been created; that the most formidable snake had been the harmless garter; that the euphorbus had never put forth a leaf, nor the seleniuret a vapor.

At all times the thoroughfare of a large town is a wilderness to me.

In desert loneliness, on mountain tops, or by the side of an unfrequented stream, there is no such hermit conceivable as the hermit of a crowd.

The study of character in faces, of universal human nature in its elbowings and windings toward its aim, may be pursued upon a city’s pave to the greatest advantage;

Every one of the beings that hastened by me in hum and tumult looked under his eyebrows, with dreadful superstition, at his neighbor and at me.

The ideal of hell, where all faith hath perished, and in endless mutation of couples the wretched sneer and glare at each other continually, was realized in that scene.

I could not bear the pavement, and so stepped into an omnibus, that I might behold less of that terrible ebb and flow of Life in Death.

“How do you like your situation?” asked my friend.

“Leaky,” replied Jonah; “find the climate don’t agree with me. I often wish I hadn’t come.”

“Can’t you leave here when you want to? I should think you would clear out if you find it uncomfortable,” said I to our entertainer.

The hemisphere of sky which walls us in is something more than a mere product of the laws of sight. It is our shield from unbearable visions.

Within our little domain of view, girt by the horizon and arched by the dome of heaven, there is enough of sorrow, enough of danger, yes, enough of beauty and of mirth visible to occupy the soul abundantly in any one single beholding.

I wondered how I had ever regarded them in the light of dead matter, at the farthest only suggesting lessons. They were now, as in my former vision, grand symbols of the sublimest spiritual truths—truths never before even feebly grasped, and utterly unsuspected.

Like a map, the arcana of the universe lay bare before me.

I saw how every created thing not only typifies, but springs forth from some mighty spiritual law as its offspring, its necessary external development—not the mere clothing of the essence, but the essence incarnate.

… suggestion of course increased proportionally to the prolonging of the hashish life, until at length there was hardly a visible or tangible object, hardly a phrase which could be spoken, that had not some such infernal potency as connected with an earlier effect of suffering.

Slowly thus does midnight close over the hashish-eater’s heaven.

One by one, upon its pall thrice dyed in Acheron, do the baleful lustres appear, until he walks under a hemisphere flaming with demon lamps, and upon a ground paved with tiles of hell. Out of this awful domain there are but three ways.

“Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’entrate!”

The first of these exits is insanity, the second death, the third abandonment.

The first is doubtless oftenest trodden, yet it may be long ere it reaches the final escape in oblivion, and it is as frightful as the domain it leaves behind.

Just then a black hand parted the top of heaven and shook at me menacingly.

Talk not to me of faces instinct with spiritual expression; that hand, slowly brandished and then withdrawn, held more expression than the most facile face.

It told me all things of terror and of doom.

… same court before whose awful bar I had bound myself at my last similar trial, I was charged by the prosecuting voice with my breach of faith, convicted, sentenced by my own soul, and after that the pangs were sharp with the blade of Nemesis.

I writhed not under affliction, but under penalty.

At this moment I answered the voice, “I have not kept my vow, but for this once be merciful, and I will sin no more.”

The thorns clung to my brow, and bloody drops stood like dew upon my hair, yet these were not the instruments of my agony.

I was withered like a leaf in the breath of a righteous vengeance.

The curtain of a lurid blackness hung between me and heaven; mercy was dumb, and I bore the anger of Omnipotence alone.

Yet upon external sympathy I did not expect to be very dependent. The institution in which I was resident offered that invaluable advantage, a large and well-selected library, where I hoped to find all those choice attachments which from without my position might deny me.

In a good library how swiftly time melts away!

Not merely in the sense of its rapid passage through our absorption in other interests, but as an element in any consideration, it becomes entirely neglected. In practical business the present is our only actuality;

In practical business the present is our only actuality; the past has been cast down like a ladder whose rounds have helped us up to a height whence we never again expect to descend.

Among books, all temporal successions are obliterated; Plato and Coleridge walk arm-in-arm; genial Chaucer and loving Elia shake hands; with them, with all, we stand enraptured upon the same plane of time, in one age, the ceaseless age of the communion of souls.

Well did Heinsius say, as he locked himself into the library of Leyden, Nunc sum in gremio saeculorum!—“Now I am in the lap of eternity!”

The very existence of the outer world seemed a base mockery, a cruel sham of some remembered possibility which had been glorious with a speechless beauty.

I hated flowers, for I had seen the enameled meads of Paradise; I cursed the rocks because they were mute stone, the sky because it rang with no music; and the earth and sky seemed to throw back my curse.

An abhorrence of speech or action, except toward the fewest possible persons, possessed me.

Now the position of things was transposed.

Day was a rayless blank, night became frightful with fire.

The first phenomenon which I began to notice, as I entered this condition, was the peculiar susceptibility of the brain to its last impression before my chamber was darkened.

“Wherein differs this palm-tree from its brothers of the desert, the tropical garden, and the bank of Nile? In this only.

The spirit of a palm has been viewlessly wandering from zone to zone in search of a body.

It reaches a warm land, and there, from ammoniacal soils, from water-atoms, from numberless elements, it slowly builds about itself, in conformance to its inner laws, roots, trunk, and branches, until some way-worn Howadji throws himself down under its shadow, saying, ‘Blessed be Allah!

“Change Into something rich and strange.”

The stones beneath my feet gleamed like unhewn crystals.

The frosty fretwork on the panels of doors which I passed, at the touch of the divine Moon-Alchemist became exquisite filigrees of silver.

As I thought upon these things, now forever irretrievably abandoned to the past, I have wept—yes, though it be unmanly,

I have wept to find myself a discrowned king, a sorcerer ravished of his wand, a god shorn of his glories.

I am not ashamed to remember that I did this;

I sprang up; I caught her by the arm; I glared into her beautiful icy eyes; I cried out, “Woman! accursed woman! is this your faith?” Now, casting off all disguise, she gave a hollow laugh, and spoke:

“Faith! do you look for faith in hell? I would have cast you to the fishes.”

My eyes were opened. She said truly. We were indeed in hell, and I had not known it until now.

With a desire to anticipate this objection, I would here say that it is not against practical aims, but the making them the chief, the controlling ones. Or, rather, even more boldly, not against practical aims at all, but against pseudo-practical.

Paradoxical as it may be, there is no man more thoroughly, more purely practical than he who is most truly ideal.

It is needless to suggest that the word “practical” is a derivative from the Greek verb “to do,” and is therefore most properly applied to the man who “does” the best for himself.

Far be it from me to recount these things again; indeed, for the past I have sometimes feared that I owed an apology, and might be expected to say, with him who had reduced courtliness to a science,

“Pardon me, gentlemen, that I am so long in dying.”

But, negatively, as the months of trial went on, I came into a state which, had it been pain, would have made me fear less for myself.

This force, too, was an hourly retarded one. There was constantly less and less hope, less volition, less interest, and the only offset to this negation was the opposite negation of disagreeable emotions.

I did not despair, because there seemed nothing to despair of.

What should I do?

Long before I had known hashish, and walked its weird uplands in pursuit of the secrets of mind, a revelation flashed upon me which, by its powers of amazement and perplexity, made the time and place of its occurrence forever memorial within me.

It was a revelation in the same way that lightning is a revelation, clear in itself, yet showing hitherto unknown hills of unbroken midnight in the distance.

While yet a mere boy, I was standing one afternoon by the side of two thinkers who talked metaphysics without taking me into their counsels, for they had no thought of my busying myself with anything but the outside of nature as I met her …

These appearances, whose cause we call “matter,” are therefore, in reality, but the effects of spirit’s action upon spirit. In no sense, then, does any such thing as dead matter exist.

It is God’s thinking felt by us.

If it shall be said that there is no difference between this and Pantheism, let me be allowed to show how the two systems differ toto caelo. I do not assert that matter is God.

Are we persuaded of these things that we may be deceived? is our hope in vain?

There is nothing too beautiful to believe of the soul.

If its visions seem falsified by matter, it is only because they are above matter; because in prophetic gazings it mirrors a higher, a more ethereal incarnation of the Creative Spirit than yet communes with it through the passages of the fleshly sense.

Of all the infinitely plastic shapes of language, perhaps the most Protean is that word “The World.”

Monosyllable as it is, it bears upon its back a load of incongruous meanings immense enough to have crushed into nothingness a dozen of the statelier sesquipedalia, which do not draw the marrow of their stubborn reality from so stanch a Saxon genealogy, nor plant …

If an itinerant miller of music, “knowing the wally of peace and quietness,” refuses to move under a shilling, he makes over the additional sixpence and thinks it clear gain.

The sound-worlds of C and D are as truly twain as Mars and Jupiter.

But I will not consume the letters of the alphabet in any further analysis of a statement so apparent to the slightest thought. Just briefly, in their relations to the remaining senses, let me set the opposite types apart.

Fertility is not the characteristic of unbroken plains; they become the torrid desert or the icy steppe; but it bestows itself upon a grouping of entire opposites; the peaks catch the clouds, and with them water the valleys.

As the collision of flint and steel gives fire, so from the crashing together of many adverse views comes out Truth, the bright, the beautiful, the eternal.

Let us thank God that human thought and human feeling are not one vast stagnant lake, but a sea whose ever-struggling and colliding waves keep their mass pure, and cleanse the intellectual atmosphere.

This tolerance is yet to be learned, for it is not a remarkably flourishing virtue even of the nineteenth century.

Our great advance at this day has been made in the direction of refining our intolerance.

For the stake and the dungeon have been substituted the taunt and the sneer, an invective which burns more lingeringly than the former, and a neglect which surpasses the latter in its fatal chill.

This tolerance is yet to be learned, for it is not a remarkably flourishing virtue even of the nineteenth century. Our great advance at this day has been made in the direction of refining our intolerance.

For the stake and the dungeon have been substituted the taunt and the sneer, an invective which burns more lingeringly than the former, and a neglect which surpasses the latter in its fatal chill.

We have yet to open our ears to the Past, which, up to our present summit of enlightenment and vision, is calling forever, in sad and earnest litany, “By Smithfield and the Lollards’ Tower, by the poverty of confiscation and the weariness of banishment, by …

The pangs of such a moving are little known to anyone but himself, or, if he has God’s crowning gift in a deep-feeling and congenial wife, to her alone beside him.

The men of the world can not hear the groans of the uprooted mandrakes.

There is the hilltop, upon which, first of all visible things, his eyes for so many years have lighted in awaking. It has grown to be to him the only summit over which it could be conceived possible for the sun to rise.

… he had worn out nerve and elasticity at an age when, according to all ordinary judgments which base themselves on insurance averages and statistics of longevity, he should have been in the prime of his life, and battling his way with fortitude to a competency.

He exhausted by mighty drafts all his credit at the bank of healthful life, and that is a corporation which never permits us to overdraw.

Up to the very last deposit of blood and sinew, nerve and spirit, prompt payment will meet every demand; then comes the crash, and the bankrupt nature is no longer known on ’Change.