General Security: The Liquidation of Opium (1925)

And you, lucid madmen, consumptives, cancer-ridden, chronic meningitics, you are the misunderstood.
There is a point in you that no doctor will ever understand and it is this point which, for me, saves you and makes you majestic, pure and marvelous :
You are outside life, you are above life, you have pains which the ordinary man does not know, you go beyond the normal level and this is why men are against you, you are poisoning their quietude, you are the dissolvers of their stability.
You have irrepressible pains, the essence of which is that they are unadaptable to any known state, incomprehensible to words. You have repeated and unceasing pains, insoluble pains, pains beyond thought, pains which are neither in the body nor the soul, but which belong to both.
And as for me, I participate in your ills, and I ask you :
who dares measure the tranquilizer for you?
In the name of what superior light, soul to soul, can they understand us, we who are at the very root of knowledge and clarity.
And this on account of our insistence, our persistence in suffering.
We, whom pain makes journey into our souls in search of a calm place to cling to, in search of stability in evil, as the others search for it in good -
We aren't mad, we're marevelous doctors, we know the necessary dose for the soul, for sensibility, for the marrow, for thought.
We want to be left in peace, the sick must be left in peace,
we ask nothing of men, we ask only for relief of our ills.
We have well evaluated our life, we know how much restriction it contains confronted by others, and especially confronted by ourselves.
We know to what willing flabbiness, to what renunciation of ourselves, to what paralysis of subtleties our malady forces us every day.
We are not commiting suicide right away.
Let us be left in peace in the meanwhile.