ABSTRACT
The envisioned revival was to take place in historical time, more precisely, at the juncture where the imagined past, distant yet glittering, met the experienced present, palpable yet tenebrous. Unlike the princess in Sleeping Beauty, whose awakening brought back to life the dormant home unaltered, the awakening of Korais’s “nation” revealed the chasm that separated it from its ancestral domain. The fairy tale signified the resumption of continuity, whereas Korais’s apologia signaled the awareness of discontinuity and, simultaneously, the will to bridge it. His understanding of the past and its relation to the present encompassed “cognitive distance” as well as “affective proximity.” The latter would compress the temporal divide by
the emulation of “[ancient] ideal examples and actions” that engaged “the moral imagination of the people.”3
