| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Pierre Grassou by Honore de Balzac: For all amusement he visited his friends, he went to see works of art,
he allowed himself a few little trips about France, and he planned to
go to Switzerland in search of inspiration. This detestable artist was
an excellent citizen; he mounted guard duly, went to reviews, and paid
his rent and provision-bills with bourgeois punctuality.
Having lived all his life in toil and poverty, he had never had the
time to love. Poor and a bachelor, until now he did not desire to
complicate his simple life. Incapable of devising any means of
increasing his little fortune, he carried, every three months, to his
notary, Cardot, his quarterly earnings and economies. When the notary
had received about three thousand francs he invested them in some
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Elizabeth and her German Garden by Marie Annette Beauchamp: damp it should pour with rain regularly every day for three hours.
My only means of getting water is <181> to go to the pump near the house,
or to the little stream that forms my eastern boundary, and the little
stream dries up too unless there has been rain, and is at the best of times
difficult to get at, having steep banks covered with forget-me-nots.
I possess one moist, peaty bit of ground, and that is to be planted
with silver birches in imitation of the Hirschwald, and is to be carpeted
between the birches with flaming azaleas. All the rest of my soil is sandy--
the soil for pines and acacias, but not the soil for roses; yet see what
love will do--there are more roses in my garden than any other flower!
Next spring the bare places are to be filled with trees that I have ordered:
Elizabeth and her German Garden |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx: intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary
condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any
property for the immense majority of society.
In one word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your
property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.
From the moment when labour can no longer be converted into
capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being
monopolised, i.e., from the moment when individual property can
no longer be transformed into bourgeois property, into capital,
from that moment, you say individuality vanishes.
You must, therefore, confess that by "individual" you mean no
The Communist Manifesto |
