go to bed daily with an audacity that would be incomprehensible if we did not
know that it is the result of ignorance of the danger.
-Baudelaire
May the merciful gods, if indeed there be such, guard those hours when no power
of the will, or drug that the cunning of man devises, can keep me from the chasm
of sleep. Death is merciful, for there is no return therefrom, but with him who
has come back out of the nethermost chambers of night, haggard and knowing,
peace rests nevermore. Fool that I was to plunge with such unsanctioned phrensy
into mysteries no man was meant to penetrate; fool or god that he was-my only
friend, who led me and went before me, and who in the end passed into terrors
which may yet be mine!
We met, I recall, in a railway station, where he was the center of a crowd of
the vulgarly curious. He was unconscious, having fallen in a kind of convulsion
which imparted to his slight black-clad body a strange rigidity. I think he was
then approaching forty years of age, for there were deep lines in the face, wan
and hollow-cheeked, but oval and actually beautiful; and touches of gray in the
thick, waving hair and small full beard which had once been of the deepest raven
black. His brow was white as the marble of Pentelicus, and of a height and
breadth almost god-like.
I said to myself, with all the ardor of a sculptor, that this man was a faun's
statue out of antique Hellas, dug from a temple's ruins and brought somehow to
life in our stifling age only to feel the chill and pressure of devastating
years. And when he opened his immense, sunken, and wildly luminous black eyes I
knew he would be thence-forth my only friend-the only friend of one who had
never possessed a friend before-for I saw that such eyes must have looked fully
upon the grandeur and the terror of realms beyond normal consciousness and
reality; realms which I had cherished in fancy, but vainly sought. So as I drove
the crowd away I told him he must come home with me and be my teacher and leader
in unfathomed mysteries, and he assented without speaking a word. Afterward I
found that his voice was music-the music of deep viols and of crystalline
spheres. We talked often in the night, and in the day, when I chiseled busts of
him and carved miniature heads in ivory to immortalize his different
expressions.
Of our studies it is impossible to speak, since they held so slight a connection
with anything of the world as living men conceive it. They were of that vaster
and more appalling universe of dim entity and consciousness which lies deeper
than matter, time, and space, and whose existence we suspect only in certain
forms of sleep- those rare dreams beyond dreams which come never to common men,
and but once or twice in the lifetime of imaginative men. The cosmos of our
waking knowledge, born from such an universe as a bubble is born from the pipe
of a jester, touches it only as such a bubble may touch its sardonic source when
sucked back by the jester's whim. Men of learning suspect it little and ignore
it mostly. Wise men have interpreted dreams, and the gods have laughed. One man
with Oriental eyes has said that all time and space are relative, and men have
laughed. But even that man with Oriental eyes has done no more than suspect. I
had wished and tried to do more than suspect, and my friend had tried and partly
succeeded. Then we both tried together, and with exotic drugs courted terrible
and forbidden dreams in the tower studio chamber of the old manor-house in hoary
Kent.
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