Member-only story
President Biden Delivers on Gun Control
The bittersweet victory is a ray of light for the progressive agenda.
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” has become a literary cliche today’s culture. It’s something people who quote Walt Whitman about containing multitudes might say with a shrug, instead of the more prosaic, recent iteration; “It is what it is.”
The quote is Charles Dickens, and those two lines happen to be the first in his classic literary work, A Tale of Two Cities.
It is unfortunate that all anyone ever remembers are the first two lines- out of context- because the entire opening paragraph, which is really just one masterpiece of a run-on sentence for the ages, is worth careful review.
The whole thing goes:
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative…