| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: revolution far enough not to be able to keep pace with, much less march
ahead of it, it is shoved aside by its more daring allies, who stand
behind it, and it is sent to the guillotine. Thus the revolution moves
along an upward line.
Just the reverse in 1848. The proletarian party appears as an appendage
to the small traders' or democratic party; it is betrayed by the latter
and allowed to fall on April 16, May 15, and in the June days. In its
turn, the democratic party leans upon the shoulders of the bourgeois
republicans; barely do the bourgeois republicans believe themselves
firmly in power, than they shake off these troublesome associates for
the purpose of themselves leaning upon the shoulders of the party of
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: has been grudging himself his own life in the meanwhile, and
saving up everything for the festival that was never to be, it
becomes that hysterically moving sort of tragedy which lies on
the confines of farce. The victim is dead - and he has
cunningly overreached himself: a combination of calamities
none the less absurd for being grim. To husband a favourite
claret until the batch turns sour, is not at all an artful
stroke of policy; and how much more with a whole cellar - a
whole bodily existence! People may lay down their lives with
cheerfulness in the sure expectation of a blessed immortality;
but that is a different affair from giving up youth with all
|
