Falconer+-+John+Cheever

Falconer 38
Farragut was a drug addict and felt that the consciousness of the
opium eater was much broader, more vast and representative of
the human condition than the consciousness of someone who had
never experienced addiction. The drug he needed was a distillate
of earth, air, water and fire. He was mortal and his addiction was a
beautiful illustration of the bounds of his mortality. He had been
introduced to drugs during a war on some island where the
weather was suffocating, the jungle rot of his hairy parts was
suppurating and the enemy were murderers. The company medic
had ordered gallons of a sticky yellow cough syrup and every
morning the “in” group drank a glass of this and went into
combat, drugged and at peace with suffocation, suppuration and
murder. This was followed by Benzedrine, and Benzedrine and his
beer ration got him through the war and back to his own shores,
his own home and his wife. He went guiltlessly from Benzedrine to
heroin, encouraged in his addiction by almost every voice he
heard. Yesterday was the age of anxiety, the age of the fish, and
today, his day, his morning, was the mysterious and adventurous
age of the needle. His generation was the generation of addiction.
It was his school, his college, the flag under which he marched into
battle. The declaration of addiction was in every paper, magazine
and airborne voice. Addiction was the law of the prophets. When
he began to teach, he and his department head would shoot up
before the big lecture, admitting that what was expected of them
from the world could be produced only by the essence of a flower.
It was challenge and response. The new buildings of the university