| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy: suggested that she hailed from elsewhere.
Precisely these thoughts had occurred to him at the first time of
seeing her; but he now went a little further with them, and
considered that as there had been no carriage seen or heard lately
in that spot she could not have come a very long distance. She
must be somebody staying at Hintock House? Possibly Mrs. Charmond,
of whom he had heard so much--at any rate an inmate, and this
probability was sufficient to set a mild radiance in the surgeon's
somewhat dull sky.
Fitzpiers sat down to the book he had been perusing. It happened
to be that of a German metaphysician, for the doctor was not a
The Woodlanders |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: society itself having conquered a new point, only the State appears to
have returned to its oldest form, to the simply brazen rule of the sword
and the club. Thus, upon the "coup de main" of February, 1848, comes
the response of the "coup de tete" December, 1851. So won, so lost.
Meanwhile, the interval did not go by unutilized. During the years
1848-1851, French society retrieved in abbreviated, because
revolutionary, method the lessons and teachings, which--if it was to be
more than a disturbance of the surface-should have preceded the February
revolution, had it developed in regular order, by rule, so to say. Now
French society seems to have receded behind its point of departure; in
fact, however, it was compelled to first produce its own revolutionary
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tao Teh King by Lao-tze: elegant-looking as jade, but (prefer) to be coarse-looking as an
(ordinary) stone.
40. 1. The movement of the Tao
By contraries proceeds;
And weakness marks the course
Of Tao's mighty deeds.
2. All things under heaven sprang from It as existing (and named);
that existence sprang from It as non-existent (and not named).
41. 1. Scholars of the highest class, when they hear about the Tao,
earnestly carry it into practice. Scholars of the middle class, when
they have heard about it, seem now to keep it and now to lose it.
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