| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo: when indescribable elevations from mole-like tunnels appeared
on the surface of civilization, where the soil cracked open,
where the roofs of caverns yawned, and where one suddenly beheld
monstrous heads emerging from the earth.
The revolutionary sense is a moral sense. The sentiment of right,
once developed, develops the sentiment of duty. The law of all
is liberty, which ends where the liberty of others begins,
according to Robespierre's admirable definition. Since '89, the
whole people has been dilating into a sublime individual; there is
not a poor man, who, possessing his right, has not his ray of sun;
the die-of-hunger feels within him the honesty of France; the dignity
Les Miserables |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy: ought to be, from the troubled dulness of his eye, and from his
face, different points of which had independent motions,
twitchings, and tremblings, unknown to himself, and involuntary.
"He was detained, I suppose, last night?" said Melbury.
"Oh yes; a bad case in the vale," she replied, calmly.
"Nevertheless, he should have stayed at home."
"But he couldn't, father."
Her father turned away. He could hardly bear to see his whilom
truthful girl brought to the humiliation of having to talk like
that.
That night carking care sat beside Melbury's pillow, and his stiff
The Woodlanders |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that
civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there.
Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting
work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human
slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical
slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world
depends. And when scientific men are no longer called upon to go
down to a depressing East End and distribute bad cocoa and worse
blankets to starving people, they will have delightful leisure in
which to devise wonderful and marvellous things for their own joy
and the joy of everyone else. There will be great storages of
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