| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Elizabeth and her German Garden by Marie Annette Beauchamp: of sentiment, deplorable in anybody, but scandalous and disgusting
in a tender female. All birthdays are observed in this fashion, and not
a few wise persons go for a short trip just about the time theirs is due,
and I think I shall imitate them next year; only trips to the country
or seaside in December are not usually pleasant, and if I go to a town
there are sure to be relations in it, and then the cake will spring up
mushroom-like from the teeming soil of their affection.
I hope it has been made evident in these pages how superior Irais
and myself are to the ordinary weaknesses of mankind; if any further
proof were <198> needed, it is furnished by the fact that we both,
in defiance of tradition, scorn this celebration of birthday rites.
Elizabeth and her German Garden |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: done; and try if we cannot, after we have learned the history of his
early life, guess at some of his probable meditations on this
celebrated clinical case; and guess also how those meditations may
have affected seriously the events of his afterlife.
Vesalius (as I said) was a Netherlander, born at Brussels in 1513 or
1514. His father and grandfather had been medical men of the
highest standing in a profession which then, as now, was commonly
hereditary. His real name was Wittag, an ancient family of Wesel,
on the Rhine, from which town either he or his father adopted the
name of Vesalius, according to the classicising fashion of those
days. Young Vesalius was sent to college at Louvain, where he
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: industrial bourgeoisie; the middle class; the small traders' class; the
army; the slums, organized as Guarde Mobile; the intellectual
celebrities, the parsons' class, and the rural population. On the side
of the Parisian proletariat stood none but itself. Over 3,000
insurgents were massacred, after the victory 15,000 were transported
without trial. With this defeat, the proletariat steps to the
background on the revolutionary stage. It always seeks to crowd
forward, so soon as the movement seems to acquire new impetus, but with
ever weaker effort and ever smaller results; So soon as any of the above
lying layers of society gets into revolutionary fermentation, it enters
into alliance therewith and thus shares all the defeats which the
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