| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: proletariat against Capital. That which it imagined to be the most
revolutionary, came about as the most counter-revolutionary event. The
fruit fell into its lap, but it fell from the Tree of Knowledge, not
from the Tree of life.
The exclusive power of the bourgeois republic lasted only from June 24
to the 10th of December, 1848. It is summed up in the framing of a
republican constitution and in the state of siege of Paris.
The new Constitution was in substance only a republicanized edition of
the constitutional charter of 1830. The limited suffrage of the July
monarchy, which excluded even a large portion of the bourgeoisie from
political power, was irreconcilable with the existence of the bourgeois
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac: by blood the superior of other men, he also believed in all the
obligations of nobility; he had the virtues and the strength it
demands. He had brought up his children in his own principles, and
taught them from the cradle the religion of their caste. A deep sense
of their own dignity, pride of name, the conviction that they were by
birth great, gave rise in them to a kingly pride, the courage of
knights, and the protecting kindness of a baronial lord; their
manners, harmonizing with their notions, would have become princes,
and offended all the world of the Rue de la Montagne-Sainte-Genevieve
--a world, above all others, of equality, where every one believed
that M. d'Espard was ruined, and where all, from the lowest to the
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane: had received orders from the commander of the
division. They were gesticulating at each other.
The soldier, pointing at them, interpreted the
scene.
One man had a final objection: "How could
yeh hear 'em talkin'?" But the men, for a large
part, nodded, admitting that previously the two
friends had spoken truth.
They settled back into reposeful attitudes
with airs of having accepted the matter. And
they mused upon it, with a hundred varieties of
The Red Badge of Courage |
