I Am Sorry to Tell You This

Remember this book was written in 1884, okay? So our protagonist's doctor gives him a "nourishing peptone enema" and he loves it! He decides that's the only way he's going to receive nourishment from now on. He's done eating with his mouth! He's going to eat... the other way. I was like, hey, this book from 1884 is shocking me. Our hero commences with a couple of paragraphs of gloating about his new way of eating, not with his mouth. "How delightful it would be... What a saving of time, what a radical deliverance... What an absolute relief from the boredom that results from the necessarily limited choice of dishes! What a vigorous protest... what a slap in the face for old Mother Nature, whose monotonous demands would be permanently silenced!" I leave the remainder of his rantings to your imagination. Well, his plan doesn't work out. It won't surprise you that on the last page or so, he says, "Well, crumble then, society! perish, old world!" That's just the kind of guy he is. We all know how he feels. At that point I believe he's raging about the subpar ingredients in today's (his day's) communion wafers. Oatmeal! Potato flour! You can't consecrate THAT stuff! "Now God refused to come down to earth in the form of potato-flour; that was an undeniable, indisputable fact."