While packing up our books I came across something I didn’t know we had: Horace Fletcher’s “Happiness as Found in Forethought Minus Fearthought” from 1898. It’s a self-help book that proves that genre has been crazy for as long as it has existed.
Some randomly selected passages:
- Does lightning sometimes strike people and kill them? Why, yes, once in a great, great long while; but when it does, they say it is the pleasantest sensation possible. Don’t you mind when you have pleasant shivers, what a delightful feeling it is? Well, they say being struck by lightning is like that—only more so.I have never had the experience of being killed by lightning, of course.
(p. 103) - Fearthought is the devil.
Fearthought is the arch-enemy of man, whose influence can be traced in every form of calamity and unhappiness.
Fearthought is like carbonic-acid gas pumped into one’s atmosphere. - All water is pure water.
- Whoever is not nervous when he is asleep need not be nervous when he is awake.
- Happy Day!
“Good morrow,” “good day,” good morning,” and “good evening,” were originally intended to have the same significance as our opening salutation, but now they have generally become stale and mean no more than “how are y-” “how d’y” and other perfunctory greetings that are ridiculous when rendered with an inflection that resembles a grunt.
If you cannot greet the morning and likewise every living thing and every inanimate thing that there is with “Happy Day,” you had better take medicine for the trouble, for you are really ill.
Happy Day! - In the Southern States of the United States of America, where the black race comes into closest touch with Caucasian civilization under conditions of free expression, is probably the best place to study fear and its opposite, chivalrous courage.
Well, I learned a lot! Thanks, Horace Fletcher. Thorace.
(Ah hah! This is the same Fletcher of Fletcherism—the practice of chewing a lot for…health?)