Project Syndicate
Sharing with you Javier Solana’s latest article published by Project Syndicate:
A Tale of Two Realities (English)
Historia de dos realidades (Spanish)
MADRID – The opening line of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Citiesretains its universality to this day. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” Dickens writes, “it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, … it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”
Dickens’s classic novel, set in London and Paris during the French Revolution, decries both the social injustices of the despotic ancien régime and the excesses of the French revolutionaries. When asked his opinion of the French Revolution almost two centuries later, former Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai reportedly answered that it was “too early to say.” That quip – though possibly the result of a misunderstanding – perfectly captures Dickens’s own ambivalence about the period of which he wrote.
