Narrative and Miscellaneous Papers, vol 1

Narrative and Miscellaneous
Papers, vol 1

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Title: Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers, Vol. I.
Author: Thomas De Quincey
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NARRATIVE AND MISCELLANEOUS PAPERS. VOL. I.
BY THOMAS DE QUINCEY.

CONTENTS OF VOLUME I.
THE HOUSEHOLD WRECK THE SPANISH NUN FLIGHT OF A
TARTAR TRIBE

THE HOUSEHOLD WRECK.
'To be weak,' we need not the great archangel's voice to tell us, 'is to be
miserable.' All weakness is suffering and humiliation, no matter for its
mode or its subject. Beyond all other weakness, therefore, and by a sad
prerogative, as more miserable than what is most miserable in all, that
capital weakness of man which regards the tenure of his enjoyments
and his power to protect, even for a moment, the crown of
flowers--flowers, at the best, how frail and few! --which sometimes
settles upon his haughty brow. There is no end, there never will be an
end, of the lamentations which ascend from earth and the rebellious
heart of her children, upon this huge opprobrium of human pride--the
everlasting mutabilities of all which man can grasp by his power or by
his aspirations, the fragility of all which he inherits, and the hollowness
visible amid the very raptures of enjoyment to every eye which looks

for a moment underneath the draperies of the shadowy present, the
hollowness, the blank treachery of hollowness, upon which all the
pomps and vanities of life ultimately repose. This trite but unwearying
theme, this impassioned common-place of humanity, is the subject in
every age of variation without end, from the poet, the rhetorician, the
fabulist, the moralist, the divine, and the philosopher. All, amidst the
sad vanity of their sighs and groans, labor to put on record and to
establish this monotonous complaint, which needs not other record or
evidence than those very sighs and groans. What is life? Darkness and
formless vacancy for a beginning, or something beyond all
beginning--then next a dim lotos of human consciousness, finding itself
afloat upon the bosom of waters without a shore--then a few sunny
smiles and many tears--a little love and infinite strife--whisperings
from paradise and fierce mockeries from the anarchy of chaos--dust
and ashes--and once more darkness circling round, as if from the
beginning, and in this way rounding or making an island of our
fantastic existence,--that is human life; that the inevitable amount of
man's laughter and his tears--of what he suffers and he does--of his
motions this way and that way--to the right or to the left--backwards or
forwards--of all his seeming realities and all his absolute negations--his
shadowy pomps and his pompous shadows--of whatsoever he thinks,
finds, makes or mars, creates or animates, loves, hates, or in dread hope
anticipates;--so it is, so it has been, so it will be, for ever and ever.
Yet in the lowest deep there still yawns a lower deep; and in the vast
halls of man's frailty, there are separate and more gloomy chambers of
a frailty more exquisite and consummate. We account it frailty that
threescore years and ten make the upshot of man's pleasurable
existence, and that, far before that time is reached, his beauty and his
power have fallen among weeds and forgetfulness. But there is a frailty,
by comparison with which this ordinary flux of the human race seems
to have a vast duration. Cases there are, and those not rare, in which a
single week, a day, an hour sweeps away all vestiges and landmarks of
a memorable