THE ADDRESS OF THE OPIUM EATER.--HOW HE OCCUPIES HIS TIME.--THE REFUGE
OF SOLITUDE AND SILENCE.--INDIFFERENCE TO SOCIETY OR
COMPANY.--DISPOSITION, PREDILECTIONS, AND GENERAL CONDUCT.
The opium eater has but a poor address. The sources of all feeling and
geniality are frozen up; he stands stiff, cold, and out of place: or in
place as a piece of statuary, to be looked at, as, for instance, the
statue of the god of pain, or as a specimen from the contents of Pandora's
box. He is kind and sincere, but cordial he cannot be. His personal
appearance is not inviting: shrunken and sallow, and with the air of a man
who desires to escape and hide. Business matters and interviews of all
kinds are consummated with the greatest possible despatch, and away he
goes to some solitary retreat. If he is a business man, he of course must
get through with the affairs of the day the best he can; as soon as
through with these, he hies with speed to things congenial to his soul.[4]
Books and literature are his favorite studies; they constitute his
greatest and most constant enjoyment. Sitting in his chair, he
alternately reads, writes, and dozes. Solitude and silence are his refuge
and fortress, and his chiefest friends: companions of his own choosing.
Visitors and company of all kinds are intruders. That this is so is not
his fault as a man; it is the result of opium. Opium has unfitted him for
the enjoyment of the society of mixed companies, and it is perhaps better
that it isolates him also, which secures him from mortification to himself
and grief to his friends.
The disposition of the opium eater is mild and quiet, as a rule. All
passion is dead,--unless the wretched irritability which comes from loss
of natural sleep and other suffering caused by opium can be called
passion. His general conduct is mild, simple, and child-like. All the
animal is dormant, quite dead. The beautiful, the good, the free from
sham, the genuine and unaffected, meet his approval. Anything that shocks
by suddenness, that is obtrusive and noisy, he desires to be out of the
reach of. Quiet and solitude, with those he loves within call, are his
proper element.
NOTE.--Among the ever-living cares and worriments that beset and
afflict the much-tortured mind of the opium eater, the dread of being
thrown out of employment, with consequent inability to procure opium,
is not the least. And it begets a species of slavery at once abject
and galling,--galling to the "better part of man," which it "cows;"
and abject, in the perfect fear and sense of helplessness which it
creates.
The opium eater is not an attractive personage. The appearance is
even worse than the reality. He looks weak and inefficient; the
lack-lustre of his eye, the pallor of his face, and the _offishness_
of his general expression, are the reverse of fascinating. This he
knows, and feels keenly and continually. He feels absolutely
dependent, and that, were he thrown out of employment, it might be
utterly impossible to obtain another situation, with his tell-tale
disadvantages arrayed like open informers against him. This is a
contingent and collateral consequence, dependent upon the position in
life occupied by the victim; but where the party is poor, though
collateral as it were, as I have above said, it is not the least among
the ills that afflict the unfortunate opium eater.