Muffins and melancholy

My best friend sent me this fantastic reverie about indigestion and melancholic fancies titled "On Eating and Drinking," written by Jerome K. Jerome, a 19th-century English writer and humorist, who I had never heard of. According to Wikipedia, Jerome K. Jerome grew up in poverty, worked at the London and Northwestern Railway collecting coal that fell along the railway, then joined a penniless acting troupe, tried his hand at journalism and failed, worked as a school teacher, a packer, and solicitor's clerk, before publishing a comic memoir of his experiences with the acting troupe and then publishing another collection of humorous essays called Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow. He then published the novel Three Men in a Boat which was a smash hit selling a million copies worldwide. The novel's financial success allowed Jerome to devote all his time to writing, although he never recaptured the success of Three Men in a Boat. He was also chosen to edit The Idler, over Rudyard Kipling, and later founded the publication To-Day. His biography, for various reasons, fills me with hope. Anyway here is what Jerome K. Jerome has to say about muffins and melancholy:

I always feel sentimental myself after dinner. It is the only time I can properly appreciate love stories. Then, when the hero clasps her to his heart in one last wild embrace, and stifles a sob, I feel sad as though I had dealt at whist and turned up only a deuce; and, when the heroine dies in the end, I weep. If I read the same tale early in the morning, I should sneer at it. Digestion, or rather indigestion, has a marvelous effect on the heart. If I want to write anything very pathetic -- I mean if I want to try and write anything very pathetic -- I eat a large plateful of hot buttered muffins about an hour beforehand, and then, by the time I sit down to my work, a feeling of unutterable melancholy has come over me. I picture heartbroken lovers parting forever at lonely wayside stiles, while the sad twilight deepens around them, and only the tinkling of a distant sheep bell breaks the sorrow-laden silence. Old men sit and gaze at withered flowers till their sight is dimmed by the mist of tears. Little dainty maidens wait and watch at open casements; but, "he cometh not," and the heavy days roll by, and the sunny gold tresses wear white and thin. The babies that they dandled have become grown men and women with podgy torments of their own, and the playmates that they laughed with are lying very silent under the waving grass. But still they wait and watch, till the dark shadows of the unknown night steal up and gather all round them, and the world with its childish troubles fades from their aching eyes.

I see pale corpses tossed on white-foamed waves and deathbeds stained with bitter tears, and graves in trackless deserts. I hear the wild wailing of women, the low moaning of the little children, the dry sobbing of strong men. It's all the muffins. I could not conjure up one melancholy fancy upon a mutton chop and a glass of champagne.

image: http://ilikewhatyousee.tumblr.com/