| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Hero of Our Time by M.Y. Lermontov: trice we had galloped past the fortress, through
the village, and had ridden into the gorge. Our
winding road was half-overgrown with tall grass
and was intersected every moment by a noisy
brook, which we had to ford, to the great despair
of the doctor, because each time his horse would
stop in the water.
A morning more fresh and blue I cannot
remember! The sun had scarce shown his face
from behind the green summits, and the blending
of the first warmth of his rays with the dying
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbot: I was standing. Desperate with fear, I rushed forward
with an unceremonious, "You must permit me, Sir --" and felt him.
My Wife was right. There was not the trace of an angle,
not the slightest roughness or inequality: never in my life had I met
with a more perfect Circle. He remained motionless while I walked
round him, beginning from his eye and returning to it again.
Circular he was throughout, a perfectly satisfactory Circle;
there could not be a doubt of it. Then followed a dialogue,
which I will endeavour to set down as near as I can recollect it,
omitting only some of my profuse apologies -- for I was covered
with shame and humiliation that I, a Square, should have been guilty
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: the narrow bourgeois substance of their own struggles, and to keep their
passion up to the height of a great historic tragedy. Thus, at another
stage of development a century before, did Cromwell and the English
people draw from the Old Testament the language, passions and illusions
for their own bourgeois revolution. When the real goal was reached,
when the remodeling of English society was accomplished, Locke
supplanted Habakuk.
Accordingly, the reviving of the dead in those revolutions served the
purpose of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old; it
served the purpose of exaggerating to the imagination the given task,
not to recoil before its practical solution; it served the purpose of
|
