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How to set new goals
How to take action towards a new life
How to create a plan for change
Happy New Year!
Year, n. A period of 365 disappointments.
I've got the Folio edition of this book. Born in Ohio in 1842, journalist, writer and vagabond, Ambrose Bierce disappears, perhaps in 1914, on the battlefields of the Mexican Civil War, leaving us that Devil's Dictionary that I propose to read at the dawn of the new year.
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Fulminant Jokes
It is a text entirely interwoven with fulminant jokes, often provocative, ready to seize that weed that poisons the field of the soul, to use a famous image of Satan's adversary par excellence, Jesus.
To speak the truth we think of a devil more ironic than perverse, even capable of serving the truth by stripping it of the trappings of hypocrisy that deform it.
An example under the heading «Help»: «Create yourself an ingrate». Or for «Culture»: «Type of ignorance that characterizes the scholar».
But let's stick to the quotation we placed, a bit mischievously, at the beginning of a new year.
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The Rhetoric of the Illusions
Bierce is right to tone down the rhetoric of the illusions that are bestowed on us with ritual greetings or that are the seasoning of politics, advertising and even sometimes of a certain religiosity that is only consolatory, sentimental, curative.
The famous Greek orator Demosthenes (4th century BC) warned: "Nothing is easier than deluding yourself. Because man believes what he desires to be true".
So let's go down to the stony ground of life and proceed with a less dreamy gaze and with more realistic projects.
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Ninth Beatitude?
The eighteenth-century English poet Alexander Pope also had some truth when he coined this "ninth beatitude": "Blessed is he who expects nothing because he will never be disappointed".
However, woe betide extinguishing every desire and expectation in the heart, extinguishing every dream: one would also lose the will to live and tear the seed of happiness from the soul.
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