| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Altar of the Dead by Henry James: himself if he was to stay away for ever from the fear of this
muddle about motives. After an interval neither longer nor shorter
than usual he re-entered the church with a clear conviction that he
should scarcely heed the presence or the absence of the lady of the
concert. This indifference didn't prevent his at once noting that
for the only time since he had first seen her she wasn't on the
spot. He had now no scruple about giving her time to arrive, but
she didn't arrive, and when he went away still missing her he was
profanely and consentingly sorry. If her absence made the tangle
more intricate, that was all her own doing. By the end of another
year it was very intricate indeed; but by that time he didn't in
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: bad health, insomnia, then the arrival of D----, the friend of
H---- that I wrote you about. He is sitting at tea talking to the
ladies, neither understanding the other; so I left them, and want
to write what little I can of all that I think about you.
Even supposing that S---- A---- demands too much of you,¹
there is no harm in waiting; especially from the point of view of
fortifying your opinions, your faith. That is the one important
thing. If you don't, it is a fearful disaster to put off from one
shore and not reach the other.
The one shore is an honest and good life, for your own delight
and the profit of others. But there is a bad life, too--a life so
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx: 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,
Socialistic interpretation, the exact contrary of its real
character. It went to the extreme length of directly opposing
the "brutally destructive" tendency of Communism, and of
proclaiming its supreme and impartial contempt of all class
struggles. With very few exceptions, all the so-called Socialist
The Communist Manifesto |
