| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx: machinery obliterates all distinctions of labour, and nearly
everywhere reduces wages to the same low level. The growing
competition among the bourgeois, and the resulting commercial
crises, make the wages of the workers ever more fluctuating. The
unceasing improvement of machinery, ever more rapidly developing,
makes their livelihood more and more precarious; the collisions
between individual workmen and individual bourgeois take more and
more the character of collisions between two classes. Thereupon
the workers begin to form combinations (Trades Unions) against
the bourgeois; they club together in order to keep up the rate of
wages; they found permanent associations in order to make
The Communist Manifesto |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain: CHAPTER XXXIII.
SIXTH CENTURY POLITICAL ECONOMY
HOWEVER, I made a dead set at him, and before
the first third of the dinner was reached, I had
him happy again. It was easy to do -- in a country
of ranks and castes. You see, in a country where
they have ranks and castes, a man isn't ever a man,
he is only part of a man, he can't ever get his full
growth. You prove your superiority over him in
station, or rank, or fortune, and that's the end of it --
he knuckles down. You can't insult him after that.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Lesson of the Master by Henry James: "You've a house in the country?" Paul asked enviously.
"Ah not like this! But we have a sort of place we go to - an hour
from Euston. That's one of the reasons."
"One of the reasons?"
"Why my books are so bad."
"You must tell me all the others!" Paul longingly laughed.
His friend made no direct rejoinder to this, but spoke again
abruptly. "Why have I never seen you before?"
The tone of the question was singularly flattering to our hero, who
felt it to imply the great man's now perceiving he had for years
missed something. "Partly, I suppose, because there has been no
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