Because I was alone, however, even the mundane seemed charged with meaning. The ice looked colder and more mysterious, the sky a cleaner shade of blue. The unnamed peaks towering over the glacier were bigger and comelier and infinitely more menacing than they would have been were I in the company of another person. And my emotions were similarly amplified: The highs were higher; the periods of despair were deeper and darker.
To a self-possessed young man inebriated with the unfolding drama of his own life, all of this held enormous appeal.

As I grew older I became a drunk. Why? Because I like ecstasy of the mind.

But he hated to be sober. It made him conscious of the people around him, of that air of struggle, of greedy ambition, of hope more sordid than despair, of incessant passage up or down…. There was kindliness about intoxication – there was the indescribable gloss and glamour it gave, like the memories of ephemeral and faded evenings

He had leaped into the embrace of self-delusion.
There was a lot of that going around.

He was not actually drunk, but emotion made him feel as if he were. Sorrow, loss, anger—these were as good as a bottle of the very worst gin.

I was in my youth and in the days of my intoxication extravagance and excitement that unveiling of the angelic world and the manifestation of the wonders of power took place in my heart, spirit, conscience and intellect.

Edward was at the stage of drunkenness in which the ego glows like a coal, and brilliant people become more inspired, but in which dull people, fired by the same inspiration, become only more dull.

I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger than reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn't impress me. I only believe in intoxication, in ecstasy, and when ordinary life shackles me, I escape, one way or another. No more walls.

Either his desire was too intense to shut out or else I was feeling my own as well as his. What was going on? It was wrong, all wrong. No, it wasn’t wrong, it was right, and that was what was wrong.

What was doubly disconcerting for me was that he showed such extraordinary and precocious insight in describing his own feelings that I felt he was making my own confession.

I was filled with such a dangerous delicious intoxication that I could have walked straight off the steps into the air, climbing on the strength of my own drunkeness into the stars. And the intoxication, as I knew even then, was the recklessness of infinite possibility.

We learned that there were pangs too sharp, griefs too deep, ecstasies too high for our finite selves to register. When emotion reached this pitch the mind choked; and memory went white till the circumstances were humdrum once more.

Mis sentimientos se acomodaron con una rapidez inconcebible al tono de mis ideas. El entusiasmo por la verdad, la libertad y la virtud ahogó todas mis pequeñas pasiones; y lo mas sorprendente es que esta efervescencia subsistió en mi corazón durante más de cuatro o cinco años, llegando a tan alto grado como jamás haya existido en otro corazón humano. Escribí