| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: the "Republic." The party of Order seems constantly engaged in a
"Reaction," which, neither more nor less than in Prussia, is directed
against the press, the right of association and the like, and is
enforced by brutal police interventions on the part of the bureaucracy,
the police and the public prosecutor--just as in Prussia; the Mountain
on the contrary, is engaged with equal assiduity in parrying these
attacks, and thus in defending the "eternal rights of man"--as every
so-called people's party has more or less done for the last hundred and
fifty years. At a closer inspection, however, of the situation and of
the parties, this superficial appearance, which veils the Class
Struggle, together with the peculiar physiognomy of this period,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Marie by H. Rider Haggard: passed me, Vrouw Prinsloo wished me good luck in a cheerful voice,
although I could see that her poor old hand was shaking, and she was
wiping her eyes with the vatdoek. Henri Marais, also in broken tones,
implored me to shoot straight for his daughter's sake. Then came Marie,
pale but resolute, who said nothing, but only looked me in the eyes, and
touched the pocket of her dress, in which I knew the pistol lay hid. Of
the rest of them I took no notice.
The moment, that dreadful moment of trial, had come at last; and oh! the
suspense and the waiting were hard to bear. It seemed an age before the
first speck, that I knew to be a vulture, appeared thousands of feet
above me and began to descend in wide circles.
Marie |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Walking by Henry David Thoreau: their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon,
the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi
will produce. Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American
liberty has become a fiction of the past--as it is to some extent
a fiction of the present--the poets of the world will be inspired
by American mythology.
The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true,
though they may not recommend themselves to the sense which is
most common among Englishmen and Americans today. It is not every
truth that recommends itself to the common sense. Nature has a
place for the wild Clematis as well as for the cabbage. Some
Walking |
