A Zen Translation of The First Paragraph of Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities

[Translator's Note: Some people must always use words! Ha!]

Times, what were they? I don't know. The best and the worst at once, writes this one man. It was the age of wisdom and the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way, all these words were also written by this same man and they all appear proper since there is indeed no distinction between any of the specified states. Everything was just the way it is, though some people who were high in the hierarchical ranking determined that only certain adjectival forms should be used to describe it, and that this was a thing which could have been for good or for evil, and again there is no distinction between those things. Maybe if he had given it more thought he wouldn't have written anything and just taken longer walks instead, but I don't know.