Tagz0r3d by artimusdin

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4 sentences on your LJ along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.
6. Tag five people.

So, what we get is...

In pictures of perfect states and less formally, as we shall see in Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Swift, and others, the theme of emancipation from present hardships is the author's main motive; but there is at least one other reason to account for the 16C cluster of such works. For the generation after Columbus, knowledge of the New World and its inhabitants began to modify the western mind about its own culture. The explorers' voyages had become a literary form, which the Eutopeans imitate minutely. They describe the ship's going off course, the remote island, the natives' treatment of the foreign crew, touchy at first, then friendly.

--Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life

Tagging: yohtan, sumanai, bard_linn, pipmudturtle, wolfieziri

(Danke schön, Random.org!)