| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx: The robe of speculative cobwebs, embroidered with flowers of
rhetoric, steeped in the dew of sickly sentiment, this
transcendental robe in which the German Socialists wrapped their
sorry "eternal truths," all skin and bone, served to wonderfully
increase the sale of their goods amongst such a public.
And on its part, German Socialism recognised, more and more, its
own calling as the bombastic representative of the petty-
bourgeois Philistine.
It proclaimed the German nation to be the model nation, and the
German petty Philistine to be the typical man. To every
villainous meanness of this model man it gave a hidden, higher,
The Communist Manifesto |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Psychology of Revolution by Gustave le Bon: Reflecting upon it continually, I was forced to recognise that
the problem was composed of a series of other problems, which I
should have to study separately. This I did for a period of
twenty years, presenting the results of my researches in a
succession of volumes.
One of the first was devoted to the study of the psychological
laws of the evolution of peoples. Having shown that the
historic races--that is, the races formed by the hazards of
history--finally acquired psychological characteristics as stable
as their anatomical characteristics, I attempted to explain how a
people transforms its institutions, its languages, and its arts.
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Odyssey by Homer: reared, and she honoured me little less than her own. But
when we both came to the time of our desire, to the flower
of age, thereupon they sent her to Same, and got a great
bride-price; but my lady clad me in a mantle and a doublet,
raiment very fair, and gave me sandals for my feet and sent
me forth to the field, and right dear at heart she held me.
But of these things now at last am I lacking; yet the
blessed gods prosper the work of mine own hands, whereat I
abide. Of this my substance I have eaten and drunken and
given to reverend strangers. But from my lady I may hear
naught pleasant, neither word nor deed, for evil hath
The Odyssey |
