| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Republic by Plato: each of you, when his turn comes, must go down to the general underground
abode, and get the habit of seeing in the dark. When you have acquired the
habit, you will see ten thousand times better than the inhabitants of the
den, and you will know what the several images are, and what they
represent, because you have seen the beautiful and just and good in their
truth. And thus our State, which is also yours, will be a reality, and not
a dream only, and will be administered in a spirit unlike that of other
States, in which men fight with one another about shadows only and are
distracted in the struggle for power, which in their eyes is a great good.
Whereas the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant
to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in
The Republic |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: veil or cowardly reticence of any kind; and inasmuch as every man
loves himself, the Ancien Regime loved "Gil Blas," and said, "The
problem of humanity is solved at last." But, ye long-suffering
powers of heaven, what a solution! It is beside the matter to call
the book ungodly, immoral, base. Le Sage would have answered: "Of
course it is; for so is the world of which it is a picture." No;
the most notable thing about the book is its intense stupidity; its
dreariness, barrenness, shallowness, ignorance of the human heart,
want of any human interest. If it be an epos, the actors in it are
not men and women, but ferrets--with here and there, of course, a
stray rabbit, on whose brains they may feed. It is the inhuman
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Taras Bulba and Other Tales by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: without tears. All were interested in the affair. It must be remarked,
to the honour of our national pride, that in the Russian's heart there
always beats a fine feeling that he must adopt the part of the
persecuted. The dignitary who had betrayed his trust was punished in
an exemplary manner and degraded from his post. But he read a more
dreadful punishment in the faces of his fellow-countrymen: universal
scorn. It is impossible to describe what he suffered, and he died in a
terrible attack of raving madness.
"Another striking example also occurred. Among the beautiful women in
which our northern capital assuredly is not poor, one decidedly
surpassed the rest. Her loveliness was a combination of our Northern
Taras Bulba and Other Tales |
