There are many indications that death is, to use a vulgar expression, pleasant, and yet people tend to avoid it. An illustration will hopefully elucidate this paradox. An acquaintance of mine told me in the early fall of 1978, over a bottle of beer and almost confidentially, that the most beautiful and also terrifying experience he had had under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs, about which I knew absolutely nothing, was in all respects exceedingly simple and thus dangerous in form. According to his recollection, he was either floating or flying, and he had full control of the direction as well as speed of his movement. The medium in which this three-dimensional exercise took place was not identifiable, but, lacking other models, he thought of it as the sky. At some point he saw a distant light, and he approached it eagerly, sensing its overpowering attraction. It was not an object, however, as he realized when he came sufficiently close to it, but something akin to an opening in the sky. He slowed down. It was bright, pale blue, soothing, and it suggested fulfillment and blissful oblivion that he had not experienced ever before. He told me, quietly and unassumingly, that he knew, instinctively perhaps, that if he came closer to this opening, let alone passed through it into that glimpse of a world, he would not be able to return. Thus he decided, under enormous strain that demanded all his willpower, to turn around and flee as fast as possible. And that he did. He added that he had not taken any such drugs ever since, fearing the repetition of this temptation. His account was so dry and so utterly devoid of metaphysical speculations, that it appeared to me that his encounter with blissful death was indeed genuine. For that reason I did not say anything, apprehensive of my own intentions. When we finished our beer and paid the waiter, we returned to the painting of his small sailboat anchored in the nearby harbor, somewhere on the coast of Istria. Most likely it was Portorož or Porto Rose in Italian, but I am not sure any more.

Later on the same day, our job finished, I asked my acquaintance about the meaning of his words: “dangerously simple in form.” He shrugged his shoulders, and said that he did not know exactly what he meant himself, but proceeded with a couple of illustrative examples, of which I will recount only one. First of all, he said by way of a preface, you must not be alone in your chemical dreams, and second, you must always be ready to use some sort of a ruse to ward off a possible tragedy, facing either yourself or someone else. When you are left to your own devices, and there is nothing to latch onto, as was the case with his own story, you may easily slip into oblivion. Then he provided a counter-example. He told me that once there were three of them who took something or other at the same time. They talked occasionally. Their intertwined trips, as he put it, reached a point when they all heard a loud horn or trumpet coming from the outside, beckoning, and when one of them, the least experienced member of the conspiracy, started to rave about the Angel of Death who had come to take him away, and as his fear rapidly turned into frenzy and then into an unendurable and euphoric craving to depart with the Angel, my acquaintance and the third person involved realized that something had to be done then and there in order to prevent a disaster. By the way, this third person was another acquaintance of mine, a more of less successful writer from Ljubljana, who, as far as I could tell, knew quite a bit about drugs. His literary skills almost certainly helped, for the two of them reshaped the circumstances by persuading the deluded fellow-traveler, convincingly it would appear, that the sound they had heard had nothing whatsoever to do with the Angel of Death, but was the horn of a car, that is, another friend who would take them for a glorious ride, as he had promised a week ago, etc. They knew what they were doing, and the trick worked. It was important, it seemed to me, that the new or superimposed story be tightly interwoven with the rest of the so-called trip, if it was to work, because no-one there really knew anything about the true nature of the sound. It might have been, for all they knew, the Angel of Death himself. By implication, even in that case the trick could be successful insofar as it was plausible and convincing. Be this as it may, what struck me as truly exciting about our conversation was that it corresponded so well with my reading of Horkheimer and Adorno, Odysseus, and the myth of Enlightenment, although in an exceedingly rudimentary form. In short, the eternal bliss is always around the corner, and easily accessible, but one nevertheless tends to circumvent it by skillful administration of cunning, where reason, philosophically speaking, plays a relatively minor and altogether auxiliary role. However, contrary to Horkheimer and Adorno, and contrary to the prevalent myth about drug addicts, even the Lotus-eaters must make sacrifices and go without. Even they need a firm mast and fellow Argonauts to tie them to it. But why this is so, remains a mystery.