Rising up, rising down! History shambles on! What are we left with? A few half-shattered Greek stelae; Trotsky's eyeglasses; Gandhi's native-spun cloth, Cortes' pieces of solid gold (extorted from their original owner, Montezuma); a little heap of orange peels left on the table by the late Robespierre; John Brown's lengthily underlined letters; Lenin's bottles of invisible ink; one of Di Giovanni's suitcases, with an iron cylinder of gelignite and two glass tubes of acid inside; the Constitution of the Ku Klux Klan; a bruised ear (Napoleon pinched it with loving condescension).. And dead bodies, of course. (They sing about John Brown's body.) Memoirs, manifestoes, civil codes, trial proceedings, photographs, statues, weapons now aestheticized by that selfsame history - the sword of Frederick the Great, and God knows what else. Then dust blows out of fresh graves, and the orange peels go grey, sink, wither, rot away. Sooner or later, every murder becomes quaint. Charlemagne hanged four and a half thousand "rebels" in a single day, but he has achieved a storybook benevolence. And that's only natural: historiography begins after the orange has been sucked, ; the peeler believes in the "great and beautiful things, " or wants to believe; easy for us to believe likewise, since dust reduced truth and counterfeit to the same greyness - caveat emptor. But ends remain fresh, and means remain inexplicable. Rising up and rising down! And whom shall I save, and who is my enemy, and who is my neighbor? . William T. Vollmann
About This Quote

An excerpt from the novel "A Passage to India" by E. M. Forster. The narrator is a British man named Mr.

Wilcox who works for the British East India Company in India. When he is traveling through the area, he meets a kind woman named Julia who has been widowed by an accident at home, and she has little money to help her family. Mr.

Wilcox offers to help her in exchange for a hotel room where he can work on his book, which is being set in India. He tells his readers that it is no easy task to write a book about India. He writes about the sights he sees along the way, and about the people he comes across during his travels through India.

At one point, he encounters a young woman named Polly who works for him as his housekeeper, and she discovers that Mr. Wilcox has been writing about her life story since they have known each other. She loses hope that he will ever stop writing about her life but when she finally gets into his room one night she finds that he has finished his book and that he intends to send it back to England with her so that it will reach the proper person in England who will publish it there.

Mr. Wilcox tells her that even though she may not like hearing this story while she sleeps, telling it will make her happy while she lives it because it will be another time when she can take pride in herself and feel relaxed about her actions again.

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  1. The hospital bulked darkly in the darkness.
  2. The smoke detectors began to ring; for they were battery-powered and thus still functioned, just as a record can still be played after the death of every member of the orchestra.
  3. Rising up, rising down! History shambles on! What are we left with? A few half-shattered Greek stelae; Trotsky's eyeglasses; Gandhi's native-spun cloth, Cortes' pieces of solid gold (extorted from their original owner, Montezuma); a little heap of orange peels left on the table by the...
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