Word: muses
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...Stalin! You?" gasped the Muse of History...
...Couldn't you stay home?" asked the Muse of History. "And leave Nicky alone with those sharpers! He never could do anything without me. Besides, I doubt if you know what it's like to be a ghost: le silence éternel de ces espaces in finis m'effraie-the eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me. Pascal said that, you know. Not bad for a man who had never been liquidated. And then," the Tsarina added, "Stalin overran Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania...
...must ask you, Madam," said the Muse of History, "to stop dancing up & down on this roof. These old palaces are scarcely more substantial than you ghosts. I am glad to see that Marxism has had the same psychotherapeutic effect on you as on so many neurotics who join the Communist Party. But your notions about Russia and Stalin are highly abnormal. All right-thinking people now agree that Russia is a mighty friend of democracy. Stalin has become a conservative. In a few hours the whole civilized world will hail the historic decisions just reached beneath your feet...
...Muse cannot help being an intellectual," said the Tsar generously, "but I do not think that we should charge her with Trotskyism. I must say, though, that for a Muse of History, you seem to have a very slight grasp of the historical dialectic. It is difficult for me to understand how a contemporary of the dialectician, Heraclitus of Ephesus, can still think in the static concepts of 19th-Century liberalism. History, Madam, is not a suburban trolley line which stops to accommodate every housewife with bundles in her arms...
...think I liked you better, Nicholas," said the Muse of History, "when you were only a weakling Tsar. You are becoming a realist...