Hopeless Romantic

Quiz Result

You are a hopeless romantic who requires plenty of emotions and warmth. You delve into your fantasies as they give you a lift out of the ordinary. Fantasies intrigue you, they mesmerize you.

You are a dreamy person, perhaps an impractical idealist, who willingly gives in to infatuation.

http://www.beautyden.com/quiz/quiz_page.php?id=2

Sunday

I finally did something this weekend that I have not done for ages--basically lazed around at home and not going out. This past month I have been going out quite on the weekends. Last week was Easter Sunday so I attended an Easter service, then I went shopping for an iron with Mom, and the Sunday before that I was off paying respects to my grandma's ashes (it was Qing Ming.). So today I finally found myself with nothing to do. But that gave me time to sleep, and more importantly, squeeze in a jog in the evening, which I have always wanted but never found the occasion to do. Hope it continues.

In the meantime, one more week to payday. The day the whole of Singapore is awaiting for.

I finally surrendered. I gave up and returned Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution to the library. I've only reached 1790. Still have 5 years more to go before Napoleon staged his coup. It was at that time when I recalled something A J P Taylor's editor at The Manchester Guardian told him when he first started to write for the newspaper, "If no one reads what you write on his way to work, then your article is of no use." Ever since then, Taylor's historical writings have been a benchmark for reader-friendly, common man literature. You want to reach out to the common man with no time, write like Taylor.

Not so for Carlyle, though I'm sure he believes in very much the same principles. A century apart, yet so different in expression. Both believed that history should not aspire to the abstract, as traditional Enlightenment histories go, but should be populist. Carlyle, in particular, drew everyday examples from the man in the street to relate historical events. The French Revolution was full of such examples. But The French Revolution was no history. It should more correctly be classified as an epic. Most of the times I couldn't make head or tail of the narrative, if there was one. It read in the same style as other epic poems like the Iliad and the Odessey. In this sense, Carlyle was much less a historian than Taylor.

On the other hand, Taylor successfully pursued the aims of Carlyle's stylistic opponents instead. Macaulay always wanted history to replace the hottest novels of the time. His aim was to have history books on the tables in every drawing room. That would be the equivalent of reading history rather say, Sidney Sheldon for example. Taylor distinctly popularised history. Few other historians have gotten invitations to cameo in movies, much less written into the script. (For authentication, just check out the entry in Wikipedia.) This is where Taylor differs so dramatically from Carlyle.

Either way, I'll choose Taylor over Carlyle any day, after my tasting of The French Revolution for the past week. "All wars are a struggle for power, but a practical occasion for their outbreak is usually found. In 1866 there was no disguise; Austria fought for her primacy, Prussia for equality." Sweet, succinct, beautiful. What else could anyone ask more?

Man, as is well said, lives by faith; each generation has its own faith, more or less; and laughs at the faith of its predecessor,--most unwisely. Grant indeed that this faith in the Social Contract belongs to the stranger sorts; that an unborn generation may very wisely, if not laugh, yet stare at it, and piously consider. For, alas, what is Contrat? If all men were such that a mere spoken or sworn Contract would bind them, all men were then true men, and Government a superfluity. Not what thou and I have promised to each other, but what the balance of our forces can make us perform to each other: that, in so sinful a world as ours, is the thing to be counted on. But above all, a People and a Sovereign promising to one another; as if a whole People, changing from generation to generation, nay from hour to hour, could ever by any method be made to speak or promise; and to speak mere solecisms: 'We, be the Heavens witness, which Heavens however do no miracles now; we, everchanging Millions, will allow thee, changeful Unit, to force us or govern us!' The world has perhaps seen few faiths comparable to that.

--Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution (1837), First Volume, Part II, Book I, Chapter VII