[00:00:00 - 00:00:10]	 This reading is from the Hashish Eater, or Passages from the Life of a Pythagorean,
[00:00:10 - 00:00:20]	 by Fitzhugh Ludlow, published in 1857 by Harper and Brothers, New York. This was the first of the
[00:00:20 - 00:00:30]	 American Hashish exposés, and many feel the best. And what I'm going to read this morning, out of a
[00:00:30 - 00:00:39]	 very rich potential group of readings, is Fitzhugh Ludlow's description of his first encounter with
[00:00:39 - 00:00:50]	 the power of cannabis. So I begin the reading partway through the chapter called "The Night
[00:00:50 - 00:01:00]	 Entrance." One morning in the spring of 1850-something, I dropped in upon the doctor
[00:01:00 - 00:01:07]	 for my accustomed lounge. "Have you seen," said he, "my new acquisitions?" I looked toward the shelves
[00:01:07 - 00:01:15]	 in the direction of which he pointed, and saw, added since my last visit, a row of comely pasteboard
[00:01:15 - 00:01:22]	 cylinders enclosing vials of the various extracts prepared by Tilden and company. Arranged in order,
[00:01:22 - 00:01:28]	 according to their size, they confronted me as pretty a rank of medicinal sharpshooters as could
[00:01:28 - 00:01:36]	 gratify the eye of an amateur. I approached the shelves that I might take them in review. A rapid
[00:01:36 - 00:01:44]	 glance showed most of them to be old acquaintances, conium taraxacum rhubarb. "Ha! What is this,
[00:01:44 - 00:01:51]	 cannabis indica?" "That," answered the doctor, looking with a parental fondness upon his new
[00:01:51 - 00:01:59]	 treasures, "is a preparation of the East Indian hemp, a powerful agent in cases of lockjaw." On
[00:01:59 - 00:02:05]	 the strength of this introduction, I took down the little archer, and removing his outer verdant coat,
[00:02:05 - 00:02:12]	 began the further prosecution of his acquaintance. To pull out a broad and shallow cork was the work
[00:02:12 - 00:02:20]	 of an instant, and it revealed to me an olive-brown extract of the consistency of pitch and a decided
[00:02:20 - 00:02:28]	 aromatic odor. Drawing out a small portion upon the point of my penknife, I was just going to put
[00:02:28 - 00:02:35]	 it to my tongue when "Hold on!" cried the doctor. "Do you want to kill yourself? That stuff is deadly
[00:02:35 - 00:02:41]	 poison." "Indeed," I replied. "No, I cannot say that I have any settled determination of that kind."
[00:02:41 - 00:02:48]	 And with that, I replaced the cork and restored the extract with all its appurtenances to the shelf.
[00:02:48 - 00:02:54]	 The remainder of my morning's visit in the sanctum was spent consulting the dispensatory under the
[00:02:54 - 00:03:01]	 title "Cannabis Indica." The sum of my discoveries there may be found with much additional information
[00:03:01 - 00:03:08]	 in that invaluable popular work, Johnston's "Chemistry of Common Life." This being universally
[00:03:08 - 00:03:14]	 accessible, I will allude no further to the result of that morning's researches than to mention the
[00:03:14 - 00:03:21]	 three following conclusions to which I came. First, the doctor was both right and wrong,
[00:03:21 - 00:03:27]	 right inasmuch as a sufficiently large dose of the drug, if it could be retained in the stomach,
[00:03:27 - 00:03:34]	 would produce death like any other narcotic, and the ultimate effect of its habitual use had always
[00:03:34 - 00:03:42]	 proved highly injurious to mind and body. Wrong, since moderate doses of it were never immediately
[00:03:42 - 00:03:50]	 deadly, and many millions of people daily employed it as an indulgence similarly to opium. Second,
[00:03:50 - 00:03:58]	 it was the hashish referred to by Eastern travellers and the subject of a most graphic chapter from the
[00:03:58 - 00:04:06]	 pen of Bayard Taylor which months before had moved me powerfully to curiosity and admiration. Third,
[00:04:06 - 00:04:14]	 I would add it to the list of my former experiences. In pursuance of this last determination,
[00:04:14 - 00:04:20]	 I waited till my friend was out of sight that I might not terrify him by that which he considered
[00:04:20 - 00:04:27]	 a suicidal venture, and then, quickly uncapping my little archer a second time, removed from his
[00:04:27 - 00:04:34]	 store of offensive armour a pill sufficient to balance the ten-grain weight of the sanctorial
[00:04:34 - 00:04:42]	 scales. This, upon the authority of Pereira and the dispensatory, I swallowed without a tremor
[00:04:42 - 00:04:49]	 as to the danger of the result, making all due allowance for the fact that I had not taken my
[00:04:49 - 00:04:57]	 hashish bolus fasting. I ought to experience its effects within the next four hours. That time
[00:04:57 - 00:05:05]	 elapsed without bringing the shadow of a phenomenon. It was plain that my dose had been insufficient. For
[00:05:05 - 00:05:11]	 the sake of observing the most conservative prudence, I suffered several days to go by without
[00:05:11 - 00:05:18]	 a repetition of the experiment, and then, keeping the matter equally secret, I administered to
[00:05:18 - 00:05:26]	 myself a pill of fifteen grains. This second was equally ineffectual with the first. Gradually,
[00:05:26 - 00:05:34]	 by five grains at a time, I increased the dose to thirty grains, which I took one evening half an
[00:05:34 - 00:05:40]	 hour after tea. I had now almost come to the conclusion that I was absolutely unsusceptible
[00:05:40 - 00:05:47]	 of the hashish influence, without any expectation that this last experiment would be more successful
[00:05:47 - 00:05:52]	 than the former ones, and indeed, with no realization of the manner in which the drug
[00:05:52 - 00:05:59]	 affected those who did make the experiment successfully, I went to pass the evening at
[00:05:59 - 00:06:06]	 the house of an intimate friend. In music and conversation, the time passed pleasantly. The
[00:06:06 - 00:06:13]	 clock struck ten, reminding me that three hours had elapsed since the dose was taken, and as yet
[00:06:13 - 00:06:20]	 not an unusual symptom had appealed. I was provoked to think that this trial was as fruitless as its
[00:06:20 - 00:06:30]	 predecessors. Ah, what means this sudden thrill? A shock, as of some unimagined vital force, shoots
[00:06:30 - 00:06:37]	 without warning through my entire frame, leaping to my fingers' ends, piercing my brain, startling
[00:06:37 - 00:06:44]	 me till I almost spring from my chair. I could not doubt it. I was in the power of the hashish
[00:06:44 - 00:06:51]	 influence. My first emotion was one of uncontrollable terror, a sense of getting something which I had
[00:06:51 - 00:06:58]	 not bargained for. That moment I would have given all I had or hoped to have to be as I was three
[00:06:58 - 00:07:28]	 hours before. No pain anywhere, not a tone gym in fiber, yet a cloud of unutterable strangeness was settling upon me, and wrapping me impenetrably in from all that was natural or familiar. Endured faces well known to me of old surrounded me, and yet they were not with me in my loneliness. I had entered upon a tremendous life which they could not share. If the disembodied ever
[00:07:28 - 00:07:58]	 returned 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 nonetheless perfect for seeming companionship. Still, I spoke. A question was put to me, and I answered.
[00:07:58 - 00:08:27]	 I even laughed at a bone mole, yet it was not my voice which spoke, perhaps one which I once had far away in another time and another place. For a while I knew nothing that was going on externally, and then the remembrance of the last remark which had been made returned slowly and indistinctly as some trait of a dream will return after many days, puzzling us to say where we have been conscious of it before.
[00:08:27 - 00:08:56]	 A fitful wind all the evening had been sighing down the chimney. Now it grew into the steady hum of a vast wheel in accelerating motion. For a while this hum seemed to resound through all space. I was stunned by it. I was absorbed in it. Slowly the revolution of the wheel came to a stop, and its monotonous din was changed for the reverberating peal of a grand cathedral organ.
[00:08:56 - 00:09:19]	 The ebb and flow of its inconceivably solemn tone filled me with a grief that was more than human. I sympathized with the dirge-like cadence as spirit sympathizes with spirit, and then, in the full conviction that all I heard and felt was real, I looked out of my isolation to see the effect of the music on my friends.
[00:09:19 - 00:09:44]	 Ah, we were in separate worlds indeed, not a trace of appreciation on any face. Perhaps I was acting strangely. Suddenly a pair of busy hands which had been running neck and neck all the evening with a nimble little crochet needle over a race ground of pink and blue silk stopped at their goal, and their owner looked at me steadfastly.
[00:09:44 - 00:10:04]	 Ah, I was found out. I had betrayed myself. In terror I waited, expecting every instant to hear the word "Hashish." No, the lady only asked me some question connected with the previous conversation. As mechanically as an automaton, I began to reply.
[00:10:04 - 00:10:19]	 As I heard once more the alien and unreal tones of my own voice, I became convinced that it was someone else who spoke, and in another world. I sat and listened. Still the voice kept speaking.
[00:10:19 - 00:10:40]	 Now, for the first time, I experienced the vast change which Hashish makes in all measurements of time. The first word of the reply occupied a period sufficient for the action of a drama. The last left me in complete ignorance of any point far enough back in the past to date the commencement of the sentence.
[00:10:40 - 00:10:57]	 Its enunciation might have occupied years. I was not in the same life which had held me when I heard it begun. And now, with time, space expanded also. At my friend's house, one particular armchair was always reserved for me.
[00:10:57 - 00:11:15]	 I was sitting in it at a distance of hardly three feet from the center table around which the members of the family were grouped. Rapidly that distance widened. The whole atmosphere seemed ductile and spun endlessly out into great spaces surrounding me on every side.
[00:11:15 - 00:11:29]	 We were in a vast hall of which my friends and I occupied opposite extremities. The ceiling and the walls ran upward with a gliding motion as if vivified by a sudden force of resistless growth.
[00:11:29 - 00:11:52]	 Oh, I could not bear it. I should soon be left alone in the midst of an infinity of space. And now, more and more, every moment increased the conviction that I was watched. I did not know then, as I learned afterwards, that suspicion of all earthly things and persons was the characteristic of the Hashish delirium.
[00:11:52 - 00:12:15]	 In the midst of my complicated hallucination, I could perceive that I had a dual existence. One portion of me was whirled unresistingly along the track of this tremendous experience. The other sat looking down from a height upon its double, observing, reasoning, and serenely weighing all the phenomena.
[00:12:15 - 00:12:31]	 This calm or being suffered with the other by sympathy, but did not lose its self-possession. Presently it warned me that I must go home, lest the growing effect of the Hashish should incite me to some act which might frighten my friends.
[00:12:31 - 00:12:48]	 I acknowledged the force of this remark very much as if it had been made by another person, and rose to take my leave. I advanced toward the center table. With every step its distance increased, I nerved myself as for a long pedestrian journey.
[00:12:48 - 00:13:13]	 Still the lights, the faces, the furniture receded. At last, almost unconsciously, I reached them. It would be tedious to attempt to convey the idea of the time which my leave-taking consumed, and the attempt, at least with all minds that have not passed through the same experience, it would be as impossible as tedious.
[00:13:13 - 00:13:31]	 At last, however, I was in the street. Beyond me the view stretched endlessly away. It was an unconverging vista whose nearest lamps seemed separated from me by leagues. I was doomed to pass through a merciless stretch of space.
[00:13:31 - 00:13:53]	 A soul just disenthralled, setting out for his flight beyond the furthest visible star, could not be more overwhelmed with his newly acquired conception of the sublimity of distance than I was at that moment. Solemnly I began my infinite journey.
[00:13:53 - 00:14:06]	 Before long I walked in entire unconsciousness of all around me. I dwelt in a marvelous inner world. I existed by turns in different places and various states of being.
[00:14:06 - 00:14:23]	 Now I swept my gondola through the moonlit lagoons of Venice. Now, alp on alp, towered above my view, and the glory of the coming sun flashed purple light upon the topmost icy pinnacle.
[00:14:23 - 00:14:41]	 In the evil silence of some unexplored tropical forest I spread my feathery leaves, a giant fern, and swayed and nodded in the spice gales over a river whose waves at once set entwelt clouds of music and perfumes.
[00:14:41 - 00:14:54]	 My soul changed to a vegetable essence. Thrilled with a strange and unimaginable ecstasy, the palace of Al-Haram could not have brought me back to humanity.
[00:14:54 - 00:15:08]	 I will not detail all the transmutations of that walk. Ever and anon I returned from my dreams into consciousness as some well-known house seemed to leap out into my path, awakening me with a shock.
[00:15:08 - 00:15:19]	 The whole way homeward was a series of such awakenings and relapses into abstraction and delirium until I reached the corner of the street in which I lived.
[00:15:19 - 00:15:28]	 Here a new phenomenon manifested itself. I had just awakened for perhaps the twentieth time and my eyes were wide open.
[00:15:28 - 00:15:41]	 I recognized all surrounding objects and began calculating the distance home. Suddenly out of a blank wall at my side a muffled figure stepped into the path before me.
[00:15:41 - 00:15:55]	 His hair white as snow hung in tangled elf locks on his shoulders where he carried also a heavy burden like unto the well-filled sack of sins which Bunyan places on the back of his pilgrim.
[00:15:55 - 00:16:02]	 Not liking his manner I stepped aside intending to pass around him and go on my way.
[00:16:02 - 00:16:11]	 This change of our relative position allowed the blaze of a neighboring streetlight to fall full on his face which had hitherto been totally obscured.
[00:16:11 - 00:16:19]	 Horror unspeakable! I shall never, till the day I die, forget that face.
[00:16:19 - 00:16:27]	 Every liniment was stamped with the records of a life black with damning crime.
[00:16:27 - 00:16:38]	 It glared upon me with a ferocious wickedness and a stony despair which only he may feel who is entering on the retribution of the unpardonable sin.
[00:16:38 - 00:16:44]	 He might have sat to a demon painter as the ideal of Shelley's Senchi.
[00:16:44 - 00:16:51]	 I seemed to grow blasphemous in looking at him and in an agony of fear began to run away.
[00:16:51 - 00:17:03]	 He detained me with a bony hand which pierced my wrist like talons and slowly taking down the burden from his own shoulders laid it upon mine.
[00:17:03 - 00:17:08]	 I threw it off and pushed him away. Silently he returned and restored the weight.
[00:17:08 - 00:17:13]	 Again I repulsed him, this time crying out, "Man, what do you mean?"
[00:17:13 - 00:17:24]	 In a voice which impressed me with the sense of wickedness as his face had done, he replied, "You shall bear my burden with me."
[00:17:24 - 00:17:32]	 And a third time laid it on my shoulders. For the last time I hurled it aside and with all my force dashed him from me.
[00:17:32 - 00:17:39]	 He reeled backward and fell and before he could recover his disadvantage I had put a long distance between us.
[00:17:39 - 00:17:46]	 Through the excitement of my struggle with this phantasm the effects of the hashish had increased mightily.
[00:17:46 - 00:17:54]	 I was bursting with an uncontrollable life. I strode with the fuse of a giant. Hotter and faster came my breath.
[00:17:54 - 00:18:02]	 I seemed to pant like some tremendous engine. An electric energy whirled me resistlessly onward.
[00:18:02 - 00:18:10]	 I feared for myself at least it should burst its fleshy walls and glance on leave a wreck of framework behind it.
[00:18:10 - 00:18:20]	 At last I entered my own house. During my absence a family connection had arrived from abroad and stood ready to receive my greeting.
[00:18:20 - 00:18:29]	 Partly restored to consciousness by the naturalness of home faces and the powerful light of a chandelier which shed its blaze through the room,
[00:18:29 - 00:18:42]	 I saw the necessity of vigilance against betraying my condition and with an intense effort suppressing all I felt I approached my friend and said all that is usual on such occasions.
[00:18:42 - 00:18:54]	 Yet recent as I was from my conflict with the supernatural I cast a stealthy look about me that I might learn from the faces of others if after all I was shaking hands with a phantom
[00:18:54 - 00:19:06]	 and making inquiries about the health of a family of hallucinations. Growing assured as I perceived no symptoms of astonishment I finished the salutation and sat down.
[00:19:06 - 00:19:13]	 It soon required all my resolution to keep the secret which I had determined to hold inviolable.
[00:19:13 - 00:19:22]	 My sensations began to be terrific not from any pain that I felt but from the tremendous mystery of all around me and within me.
[00:19:22 - 00:19:33]	 By an appalling introversion all the operations of vitality which in our ordinary state go on unconsciously came vividly into my experience.
[00:19:33 - 00:19:43]	 Through every thinnest corporeal tissue and minutest vein I could see the circulation of the blood along each inch of its progress.
[00:19:43 - 00:19:53]	 I knew when every valve opened and when it shut every sense was pretty naturally awakened. The room was full of a great glory.
[00:19:53 - 00:20:02]	 The beating of my heart was so clearly audible that I wondered to find it unnoticed by those who were sitting by my side.
[00:20:02 - 00:20:18]	 Lo now the heart became a great fountain whose jet played upward with loud vibrations and a striking upon the roof of my skull as on a gigantic dome fell back with a splash and echo into its reservoir.
[00:20:18 - 00:20:32]	 Faster and faster came the pulsations until at last I heard them no more and the stream became one continuously pouring flood whose roar resounded through all my frame.
[00:20:32 - 00:20:44]	 I gave myself up the rest since judgement which still sat unimpaired above my perverted senses argued that congestion must take place in a few moments and close the drama with my death.
[00:20:44 - 00:20:57]	 But my clutch would not yet relax from hope. The thought struck me. Might not this rapidity of circulation be after all imaginary? I determined to find out.
[00:20:57 - 00:21:09]	 Going to my own room I took out my watch and placed my hand upon my heart. The very effort which I made to ascertain the reality gradually brought perception back to its normal state.
[00:21:09 - 00:21:16]	 In the intensity of my observations I began to perceive that the circulation was not as rapid as I had thought.
[00:21:16 - 00:21:32]	 From a pulseless flow it gradually came to be apprehended as a hurrying succession of intense throbs then less swift and less intense till finally on comparing it with the second hand I found that about ninety a minute was its average rapidity.
[00:21:32 - 00:21:56]	 Greatly comforted I desisted from the experiment. Almost instantly the hallucination returned. Again I dreaded apoplexy, congestion, hemorrhage and a multiplicity of nameless deaths and drew my picture as I might be found on the morrow, stark and cold, by those whose agony would be redoubted by the mystery of my end.
[00:21:56 - 00:22:08]	 I reasoned with myself. I bathed my forehead. It did no good. There was one resource left. I would go to a physician. With this resolve I left my room and went to the head of the staircase.
[00:22:08 - 00:22:21]	 The family had all retired for the night and the gas was turned off from the burner in the hall below. I looked down the stairs. The depth was fathomless. It was a journey of years to reach the bottom.
[00:22:21 - 00:22:38]	 The dim light of the sky shone through the narrow panes at the sides of the front door and seemed a demon light in the middle darkness of the abyss. I never could get down. I sat me down despairingly upon the topmost step. Suddenly a sublime thought possessed me.
[00:22:38 - 00:22:57]	 If the distance be infinite, I am immortal. It shall be tried. I commenced the descent wearily, wearily down through my league-long, year-long journey. To record my impressions in that journey would be to repeat what I have said of the time of Hashish.
[00:22:57 - 00:23:12]	 Now stopping to rest as a traveler would turn aside at a wayside inn, now toiling down through the lonely darkness, I came by and by to the end and passed out into the street.
[00:23:13 - 00:23:18]	 [chatter]
[00:23:18 - 00:23:27]	 [silence]