Narrative and Miscellaneous PapersDe Quincey, Thomas
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Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers
De Quincey, Thomas
English essays; English fiction
not the first by many a million, that has fled from the very same form
of wretchedness, or from its effects upon the genial spirits, to the
same gloomy refuge. It should never be forgotten that, although some
other more overt vexation is generally assigned as the proximate cause
of suicide, and often may be so as regards the immediate occasion, too
generally this vexation borrowed its whole power to annoy, from the
habitual atmosphere of irritation in which the system had been kept by
indigestion. So that indirectly, and virtually, perhaps, all suicides
may be traced to mismanaged digestion. Meantime, in alluding at all to
so dreadful a subject as suicide, I do so only by way of giving deeper
effect to the opinion expressed above, upon the chief cause of relapse
into habits of intemperance amongst those who have once accomplished
their deliverance. Errors of digestion, either from impaired powers, or
from powers not so much enfeebled as deranged, is the one immeasurable
source both of disease and of secret wretchedness to the human race.
Life is laid waste by the eternal fretting of the vital forces,
emanating from this one cause. And it may well be conceived, that if
cases so endless, even of suicide, in every generation, are virtually
traceable to this main root, much more must it be able to shake
and undermine the yet palpitating frame of the poor fugitive from
intemperance; since indigestion in every mode and variety of its changes
irresistibly upholds the temptation to that form of excitement which,
though one foremost cause of indigestion, is yet unhappily its sole
immediate palliation.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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