| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: upon its work before it has stricken off all superstition concerning the
past. Former revolutions require historic reminiscences in order to
intoxicate themselves with their own issues. The revolution of the
nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to reach
its issue. With the former, the phrase surpasses the substance; with
this one, the substance surpasses the phrase.
The February revolution was a surprisal; old society was taken unawares;
and the people proclaimed this political stroke a great historic act
whereby the new era was opened. On the 2d of December, the February
revolution is jockeyed by the trick of a false player, and what is seer
to be overthrown is no longer the monarchy, but the liberal concessions
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Master and Man by Leo Tolstoy: fives. . . .' He saw that it came out to more than twelve
thousand rubles, but could not reckon it up exactly without a
counting-frame. 'But I won't give ten thousand, anyhow. I'll
give about eight thousand with a deduction on account of the
glades. I'll grease the surveyor's palm--give him a hundred
rubles, or a hundred and fifty, and he'll reckon that there are
some five desyatins of glade to be deducted. And he'll let it
go for eight thousand. Three thousand cash down. That'll move
him, no fear!' he thought, and he pressed his pocket-book with
his forearm.
'God only knows how we missed the turning. The forest ought to
Master and Man |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche: respect to the NEW philosophers who are appearing, they must
still more be closed windows and bolted doors. Briefly and
regrettably, they belong to the LEVELLERS, these wrongly named
"free spirits"--as glib-tongued and scribe-fingered slaves of the
democratic taste and its "modern ideas" all of them men without
solitude, without personal solitude, blunt honest fellows to whom
neither courage nor honourable conduct ought to be denied, only,
they are not free, and are ludicrously superficial, especially in
their innate partiality for seeing the cause of almost ALL human
misery and failure in the old forms in which society has hitherto
existed--a notion which happily inverts the truth entirely! What
Beyond Good and Evil |
