| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: parties and the masses of the old French revolution, achieved in Roman
costumes and with Roman phrases the task of their time: the emancipation
and the establishment of modern bourgeois society. One set knocked to
pieces the old feudal groundwork and mowed down the feudal heads that
had grown upon it; Napoleon brought about, within France, the conditions
under which alone free competition could develop, the partitioned lands
be exploited the nation's unshackled powers of industrial production be
utilized; while, beyond the French frontier, he swept away everywhere
the establishments of feudality, so far as requisite, to furnish the
bourgeois social system of France with fit surroundings of the European
continent, and such as were in keeping with the times. Once the new
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Ballads by Robert Louis Stevenson: written: a small attention from a clansman to his chief.
Note 12, "LET THE PIGS BE TAPU." It is impossible to explain
TAPU in a note; we have it as an English word, taboo.
Suffice it, that a thing which was TAPU must not be touched,
nor a place that was TAPU visited.
Note 13, "FISH, THE FOOD OF DESIRE." There is a special word
in the Tahitian language to signify HUNGERING AFTER FISH. I
may remark that here is one of my chief difficulties about
the whole story. How did king, commons, women, and all come
to eat together at this feast? But it troubled none of my
numerous authorities; so there must certainly be some natural
Ballads |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: and continually thrown against the boiler, so that he was found
next day to be covered with burns, yet kept an even fire. It was a
very thankful party that sat down that evening to meat in the Hotel
at Gairloch. And perhaps, although the thing was new in the
family, no one was much surprised when Fleeming said grace over
that meal. Thenceforward he continued to observe the form, so that
there was kept alive in his house a grateful memory of peril and
deliverance. But there was nothing of the muff in Fleeming; he
thought it a good thing to escape death, but a becoming and a
healthful thing to run the risk of it; and what is rarer, that
which he thought for himself, he thought for his family also. In
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