“If at times you have seen me bitter and hard, it was because I was super-imposing my early sufferings on the lack of feeling, the selfishness, of which I had thousands of examples in high places; or I was thinking of the obstacles which hatred, envy, jealousy, and calumny have placed between me and success. In Paris, when certain people see you ready to put your foot in the stirrup, some of them pull you back by the coat-tail, others loosen the buckle of the saddle-girth so that you’ll fall and break your head; this one takes the shoes of your horse, that one steals your whip. The least treacherous is the one you see coming up to shoot you at point-blank range. You have enough talent, my dear fellow, soon to be acquainted with the horrible, unending battle which mediocrity wages against superiority. If one evening you lose twenty-five louis, the next day you will be accused of being a gambler and your best friends will say that the day before you lost twenty-five thousand francs. If you have a headache, you will be called a lunatic. If you have one outburst of temper, they will say you are a social misfit. If, in order to resist this army of pygmies, you muster your superior forces, your best friends will cry out that you want to eat up everything, that you claim to have the right to dominate and lord it over others. In short, your good qualities will become failings, your failings will become vices, and your virtues will be crimes. If you have saved a man, they’ll say you have killed him; if your patient is in circulation again, they will affirm that you have sacrificed the future to the present; if he is not dead, he will die. Hesitate, and you will be lost! Invent anything at all, claim your just due, you will be regarded as a sly character, difficult to deal with, who is standing in the way of the young men. So, my dear fellow, if I don’t believe in God, I believe still less in man.”
credits
from HdB - album (2020),
released January 8, 2020
Narration & concept by Peter Hoflich
Soundscapes & mixes produced by Cronkite Satellite
Peter Hoflich is a musician living in Singapore. He has sung in the rock bands MegalomaniA, the Hideous Motör-Apes, Reckless
Hearts, Von Doom and The Sinisters, as well as the folk unit the Es with Athena Desai and Jae Lee. He also performs his own acoustic songs from time to time, and is trying a few experimental things in the home studio....more
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