| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: own violent destruction. It not only consecrates, like the character of
1830, the division of powers, but it extends this feature to an
unbearably contradictory extreme. The "play of constitutional powers,"
as Guizot styled the clapper-clawings between the legislative and the
executive powers, plays permanent "vabanque" in the Constitution of
1848. On the one side, 750 representatives of the people, elected and
qualified for re-election by universal suffrage, who constitute an
uncontrollable, indissoluble, indivisible National Assembly, a National
Assembly that enjoys legislative omnipotence, that decides in the last
instance over war, peace and commercial treaties, that alone has the
power to grant amnesties, and that, through its perpetuity, continually
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Enchanted Island of Yew by L. Frank Baum: the Enchanted Island of Yew. It was ruled by a good and generous
queen, who welcomed the strangers to her palace and gave a series of
gay entertainments in their honor.
King Terribus was especially an object of interest, for every one had
heard his name and feared him and his fierce people. But when they
beheld his pleasant countenance and listened to his gentle voice they
began to regard him with much love and respect; and really Terribus
was worthy of their friendship since he had changed from a deformed
monster into an ordinary man, and had forbidden his people ever again
to rob and plunder their weaker neighbors.
But the most popular personages visiting at the court of the Queen of
The Enchanted Island of Yew |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Massimilla Doni by Honore de Balzac: together on the Piazza San Marco while awaiting the Prince.
"I shall be only too glad if he should not come," he added.
This was the text for a conversation between the two, Vendramin
regarding it as a favorable opportunity for consulting the physician,
and telling him the singular position Emilio had placed himself in.
The Frenchman did as every Frenchman does on all occasions: he
laughed. Vendramin, who took the matter very seriously, was angry; but
he was mollified when the disciple of Majendie, of Cuvier, of
Dupuytren, and of Brossais assured him that he believed he could cure
the Prince of his high-flown raptures, and dispel the heavenly poetry
in which he shrouded Massimilla as in a cloud.
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