I Believe That When I Am Dead,

Men Do Not Knowingly Drink For The Effect Alcohol Produces On The Body. What They Drink For Is The Brain-effect; And If It Must Come Through The Body, So Much The Worse For The Body.

There Are, Broadly Speaking, Two Types Of Drinkers. There Is The Man Whom We All Know, Stupid, Unimaginative, Whose Brain Is Bitten Numbly By Numb Maggots; Who Walks Generously With Wide-spread, Tentative Legs, Falls Frequently In The Gutter, And Who Sees, In The Extremity Of His Ecstasy, Blue Mice And Pink Elephants.... The Other Type Of Drinker Has Imagination, Vision. Even When Most Pleasantly Jingled He Walks Straight And Naturally, Never Staggers Nor Falls, And Knows Just Where He Is And What He Is Doing. It Is Not His Body But His Brain That Is Drunken.

But Especially He Loved To Run In The Dim Twilight Of The Summer Midnights, Listening To The Subdued And Sleepy Murmurs Of The Forest, Reading Signs And Sounds As A Man May Read A Book, And Seeking For The Mysterious Something That Called -- Called, Waking Or Sleeping, At All Times, For Him To Come.

There Is An Ecstasy That Marks The Summit Of Life, And Beyond Which Life Cannot Rise. And Such Is The Paradox Of Living, This Ecstasy Comes When One Is Most Alive, And It Comes As A Complete Forgetfulness That One Is Alive. This Ecstasy, This Forgetfulness Of Living, Comes To The Artist, Caught Up And Out Of Himself In A Sheet Of Flame; It Comes To The Soldier, War-mad In A Stricken Field And Refusing Quarter; And It Came To Buck, Leading The Pack, Sounding The Old Wolf-cry, Straining After The Food That Was Alive And That Fled Swiftly Before Him Through The Moonlight.

I Would Rather Be Ashes Than Dust.