| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling: had a tenant bound down for, say, twenty years, he would squeeze the
very life out of him. The notion was to keep up a stream of
independent cultivators in the Sub-Montane Tracts; and
ethnologically and politically the notion was correct. The only
drawback was that it was altogether wrong. A native's life in India
implies the life of his son. Wherefore, you cannot legislate for
one generation at a time. You must consider the next from the
native point of view. Curiously enough, the native now and then,
and in Northern India more particularly, hates being over-protected
against himself. There was a Naga village once, where they lived on
dead AND buried Commissariat mules . . . . But that is another
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: near Moscow- despite the strength of the feeling that had arisen in
all ranks- the force of circumstances compelled it to retire beyond
Moscow. And the troops retired one more, last, day's march, and
abandoned Moscow to the enemy.
For people accustomed to think that plans of campaign and battles
are made by generals- as any one of us sitting over a map in his study
may imagine how he would have arranged things in this or that
battle- the questions present themselves: Why did Kutuzov during the
retreat not do this or that? Why did he not take up a position
before reaching Fili? Why did he not retire at once by the Kaluga
road, abandoning Moscow? and so on. People accustomed to think in that
War and Peace |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Democracy In America, Volume 2 by Alexis de Toqueville: ideas. The effect of all revolutions is therefore, more or less,
to surrender men to their own guidance, and to open to the mind
of every man a void and almost unlimited range of speculation.
When equality of conditions succeeds a protracted conflict
between the different classes of which the elder society was
composed, envy, hatred, and uncharitableness, pride, and
exaggerated self- confidence are apt to seize upon the human
heart, and plant their sway there for a time. This,
independently of equality itself, tends powerfully to divide men
- to lead them to mistrust the judgment of others, and to seek
the light of truth nowhere but in their own understandings.
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