Every night before going to sleep, we must ask ourselves: whose weakness did I overcome today? What asset did I acquire?
xxx/ellauri255.html on line 94: Rob Attaboy pohjustaa Antony Pyp Pipon haastattelua: The Provisional Government, its effectiveness hampered by a lack of legitimacy, faced a powerful rival in the shape of the socialist-led Petrograd Soviet that ruled the country’s then-capital city (now called St Petersburg). The Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin (note only 2 letters away from Vladimir Putin!) , sought to undermine the Provisional Government, which itself made a series of missteps – notably continued failures in the war against Germany and Austria-Hungary. Capitalising on these weaknesses, the Bolsheviks under Lenin and Leon Trotsky launched a coup d’état, the so-called October Revolution, seizing power with relative ease. Consolidating that power proved far more difficult, as a combination of opponents – ranging from former tsarist generals to other leftwing political groups who distrusted the Bolsheviks – took up arms against them.
xxx/ellauri379.html on line 123: One of the most resoundingly Modernist elements of Conrad’s work lies in this kind of early post-structuralist treatment of language—his insistence on the inherent inability of words to express the real, in all of its horrific truth. Marlow’s journey is full of encounters with things that are “unspeakable,” with words that are uninterpretable, and with a world that is eminently “inscrutable.” In this way, language fails time and time again to do what it is meant to do—to communicate. It’s a phenomenon best summed up when Marlow tells his audience that “it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence—that which makes its truth, its meaning—its subtle and penetrating essence… We live, as we dream—alone.” Kurtz—as “eloquent” as he may be—can’t even adequately communicate the terrifying darkness he observed around him.“The horror! The horror!” is all he can say. Some critics have surmised that part of Heart of Darkness’s mass appeal comes from this ambiguity of language—from the free rein it gives its readers to interpret. Others posit this as a great weakness of the text, viewing Conrad’s inability to name things as an unseemly quality in a writer who’s supposed to be one of the greats. Perhaps this is itself a testament to the Heart of Darkness’s breadth of interpretability.
xxx/ellauri400.html on line 217: He considered the most important criteria used to judge the value of a poem were "high truth" and "high seriousness". By this standard, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales did not merit Arnold's approval. According to Arnold, Homer is the best model of a simple grand style, while Milton is the best model of severe grand style. Dante, however, is an example of both. Even Chaucer, in Arnold's view, in spite of his virtues such as benignity, largeness, and spontaneity, lacks seriousness. Burns too lacks sufficient seriousness, because he was hypocritical in that while he adopted a moral stance in some of his poems, in his private life he flouted morality. Arnold believed that a modern writer should be aware that contemporary literature is built on the foundations of the past, and should contribute to the future by continuing a firm tradition. Quoting Goethe and Kuckuksuhr in support of his view, he asserts that his age suffers from spiritual weakness because it thrives on self-interest and scientific materialism, and therefore cannot provide noble characters such as those found in Classical literature.
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