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January 18, 1998. "Fame, Fear & Feelings." "Fame" Recognition is something that we all seem to crave in the early stages of our careers, but recognition impacts on our liberty; which, as Gibbon ranked, is "the first of earthly blessings." The impact increases proportate to the increase of the recognition. There comes a point when fame or notarity is a curse. Of fame, Pope says, it is but "a fancied life in others' breath ... All that we feel of it begins and ends in the small circle of our foes and friends ..." It will get you nothing but a crowd "of stupid starers and of loud huzzas." "Fear" "Man comes into life to seek and find sufficient beauty, to serve it, to win and increase it, to fight for it, to face anything and bear anything for it, counting death as nothing so long as the dying eyes still turn to it. And fear and dullness and indolence and appetite -- which indeed are no more than fear's three crippled brothers ..." Author unknown. "Things done well, And with a care, exempt themselves from fear: Things done without example, in their issue Are to be fear'd." Shaks.: Henry VIII. "The first duty of man is that of subduing fear. We must get rid of fear; we cannot act at all till then. A man's acts are slavish, not true but specious; his very thoughts are false, he thinks too as a slave and coward, till he has got fear under his feet." Carlyle, 1840. "Feelings." "-Every person's feelings have a front-door and a side-door by which they may be entered. This front-door leads into a passage which opens into an ante-room, and this into the interior apartments. The side-door opens at once into the sacred chambers. (From Professor at the Breakfast Table; Holmes expands on this and says one should always be careful, in respect to the side door, to whom one gives the key.) [Top] [Archives] [To Blupete's Essays] [Thoughts & Quotes of blupete] [Home] Peter Landry January, 1998 (2019)