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The Path to Rome by Hilaire Belloc
page 10 of 311 (03%)

Take, for instance, this phrase that set me writing, _'Ce nest que le
premier pas qui coute'_. It is false. Much after a beginning is
difficult, as everybody knows who has crossed the sea, and as for the
first _step_ a man never so much as remembers it; if there is
difficulty it is in the whole launching of a thing, in the first ten
pages of a book, or the first half-hour of listening to a sermon, or
the first mile of a walk. The first step is undertaken lightly,
pleasantly, and with your soul in the sky; it is the five-hundredth
that counts. But I know, and you know, and he knew (worse luck) that
he was saying a thorny and catching thing when he made up that phrase.
It worries one of set purpose. 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
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