"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."
SOURCE: Ludlow, Fitz Hugh "The Night of
Apotheosis"
The Hasheesh Eater, available at this library.
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