It Is As Though One Had A Voice Inside
One Saying:
'I know you, you will never begin anything.
Look at what you might
have done! Here you are, already twenty-one, and you have not yet
written a dictionary. What will you do for fame? Eh? Nothing: you are
intolerably lazy - and what is worse, it is your fate. Beginnings are
insuperable barriers to you. What about that great work on The
National Debt? What about that little lyric on Winchelsea that you
thought of writing six years ago? Why are the few lines still in your
head and not on paper? Because you can't begin. However, never mind,
you can't help it, it's your one great flaw, and it's fatal. Look at
Jones! Younger than you by half a year, and already on the _Evening
Yankee_ taking bribes from Company Promoters! And where are you?' &c.,
&c. - and so forth.
So this threat about the heavy task of Beginning breeds
discouragement, anger, vexation, irritability, bad style, pomposity
and infinitives split from helm to saddle, and metaphors as mixed as
the Carlton. But it is just true enough to remain fast in the mind,
caught, as it were, by one finger. For all things (you will notice)
are very difficult in their origin, and why, no one can understand.
_Omne Trinum_: they are difficult also in the shock of maturity and in
their ending. Take, for instance, the Life of Man, which is the
Difficulty of Birth, the Difficulty of Death, and the Difficulty of
the Grand Climacteric.
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