Shadow - “On the Past and Future”
Hazlitt cites an abstract shadow to allude to the flimsy future for the shadow is illusory: “Is it nothing to have been, and to have been happy or miserable? Or is it a matter of no moment to think whether I have been one or the other? Do I delude myself, do I build upon a shadow or a dream, do I dress up in the gaudy garb of idleness and folly a pure fiction, with nothing answering to it in the universe of things and the records of truth, when I look back with fond delight or with tender regret to that which was at one time to me my all, when I revive the glowing image of some bright reality.” The allegorical shadow sanctions that the future is non-concrete; thus, its projections may not materialize. Comparatively, the past can be defined through clear-cut recollections. Banking on the unspecified future is analogous to upholding impractical notions which may not in fact become matters of actuality.
Book-worm - “On the Ignorance of the Learned”
‘A Book-worm’ is a figure that incarnates an investment in consummate ignorance: “The book-worm wraps himself up in his web of verbal generalities, and sees only the glimmering shadows of things reflected from the minds of others. Nature puts him out. The impressions of real objects, stripped of the disguises of words and voluminous roundabout descriptions, are blows that stagger him; their variety distracts, their rapidity exhausts him; and he turns from the bustle, the noise, and glare, and whirling motion of the world about him (which he has not an eye to follow in its fantastic changes, nor an understanding to reduce to fixed principles), to the quiet monotony of the dead languages, and the less startling and more intelligible combinations of the letters of the alphabet.” A book-worm is colossally exposed to the subjective acuities that are accentuated in the books that he/ she largely studies. Accordingly, the book-worm cannot fit in scenarios that necessitate natural rationale for an artificial mind-set deters ‘real objects’ away from the book–world. By fostering a principally static mind-set, a book-worm trusts the fantasy of books which condenses the likelihoods of such a book-worm being growth-oriented.
