| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: with a similar maneuver, did Bonaparte prepare his stroke of December 2
against the royalist legislature and its constitutional republic. Let
it not be forgotten that the same party, which, on December 20, 1848,
constituted Bonaparte's ministry, constituted also, on December 2, 1851,
the majority of the legislative National Assembly.
In August the constitutive assembly decided not to dissolve until it had
prepared and promulgated a whole series of organic laws, intended to
supplement the Constitution. The party of Order proposed to the
assembly, through Representative Rateau, on January 6, 1849, to let the
Organic laws go, and rather to order its own dissolution. Not the
ministry alone, with Mr. Odillon Barrot at its head, but all the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn: her arms,-- then all the listeners uttered together one long, long
shuddering cry of anguish; and thereafter they wept and wailed so loudly
and so wildly that the blind man was frightened by the violence and grief
that he had made. For much time the sobbing and the wailing continued. But
gradually the sounds of lamentation died away; and again, in the great
stillness that followed, Hoichi heard the voice of the woman whom he
supposed to be the Rojo.
She said:--
"Although we had been assured that you were a very skillful player upon
the biwa, and without an equal in recitative, we did not know that any one
could be so skillful as you have proved yourself to-night. Our lord has
Kwaidan |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gambara by Honore de Balzac: where virtue would fain maintain you; they perennially revive in you
the energies you have exhausted in contending with the phantom of
love. You never suspected this! The faintest glimmer of hope led you
on in pursuit of the sweet vision.
"At last the disappointments of many years have undermined your
patience,--an angel would have lost it long since,--and now the
apparition so long pursued is no more than a shade without substance.
Madness that is so nearly allied to genius can know no cure in this
world. When this thought first struck you, you looked back on your
past youth, sacrificed, if not wasted; you then bitterly discerned the
blunder of nature that had given you a father when you looked for a
Gambara |
