✺ ✺ ✺ ✺ ✺
This is beautifully written and carries its darkness lightly. Here's a rather interesting but depressing conversation between a man who can't stop drinking and a doctor who ran out of luck. It also includes a cry from the heart of an alcoholic who called for Prohibition some 20 years before it was brought in, but who had no idea that Prohibition itself would be a disaster.
014
John Barleycorn
by Jack London (1913)
✺ ✺ ✺ ✺ ✺
Sometimes warning thoughts crossed my mind. Where was this steady drinking leading? But trust John Barleycorn to silence such questions. "Come on and have a drink and I'll tell you all about it," is his way. And it works. For instance, the following is a case in point, and one which John Barleycorn never wearied of reminding me:
I had suffered an accident which required a ticklish operation. One morning, a week after I had come off the table, I lay on my hospital bed, weak and weary. The sunburn of my face, what little of it could be seen through a scraggly growth of beard, had faded to a sickly yellow. My doctor stood at my bedside on the verge of departure. He glared disapprovingly at the cigarette I was smoking.
"That's what you ought to quit," he lectured. "It will get you in the end. Look at me."
I looked. He was about my own age, broad-shouldered, deep-chested, eyes sparkling, and ruddy-cheeked with health. A finer specimen of manhood one would not ask.
"I used to smoke," he went on. "Cigars. But I gave even them up. And look at me."
The man was arrogant, and rightly arrogant, with conscious well-being. And within a month he was dead. It was no accident. Half a dozen different bugs of long scientific names had attacked and destroyed him. The complications were astonishing and painful, and for days before he died the screams of agony of that splendid manhood could be heard for a block around. He died screaming.
"You see," said John Barleycorn. "He took care of himself. He even stopped smoking cigars. And that's what he got for it. Pretty rotten, eh? But the bugs will jump. There's no forefending them. Your magnificent doctor took every precaution, yet they got him. When the bug jumps you can't tell where it will land. It may be you. Look what he missed. Will you miss all I can give you, only to have a bug jump on you and drag you down? There is no equity in life. It's all a lottery. But I put the lying smile on the face of life and laugh at the facts. Smile with me and laugh. You'll get yours in the end, but in the meantime laugh. It's a pretty dark world. I illuminate it for you. It's a rotten world, when things can happen such as happened to your doctor. There's only one thing to do: take another drink and forget it."
✺ ✺ ✺ ✺ ✺
✺ ✺ ✺ ✺ ✺
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.