| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Glasses by Henry James: he went into figures deep enough he would become, among the girls
down in Hampshire or elsewhere, one of those numerous prizes of
battle whose defences are practically not on the scale of their
provocations. I nursed in short the thought that it was probably
open to him to develop as one of the types about whom, as the years
go on, superficial critics wonder without relief how they ever
succeeded in dragging a bride to the altar. He never alluded to
Flora Saunt; and there was in his silence about her, quite as in
Mrs. Meldrum's, an element of instinctive tact, a brief implication
that if you didn't happen to have been in love with her there was
nothing to be said.
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: that the villagers could not pass from one to the other without
many miles of a round. And when we came back in winter he asked us
to help him to make a road across this morass for these village
people to use. So out we went, day after day, and learned how to
lay levels and to break stones, and to wheel barrows along a plank
- a very difficult thing to do. And Ruskin worked with us in the
mist and rain and mud of an Oxford winter, and our friends and our
enemies came out and mocked us from the bank. We did not mind it
much then, and we did not mind it afterwards at all, but worked
away for two months at our road. And what became of the road?
Well, like a bad lecture it ended abruptly - in the middle of the
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: "Saint Ignatius said, when general of his company, that if the
Holy Father were to order him to set sail in the first bark which
he might find in the port of Ostia, near Rome, and to abandon
himself to the sea, without a mast, without sails, without oars
or rudder or any of the things that are needful for navigation or
subsistence, he would obey not only with alacrity, but without
anxiety or repugnance, and even with a great internal
satisfaction."[190]
[190] Rodriguez: Op. cit., Part iii., Treatise v., ch. vi.
With a solitary concrete example of the extravagance to which the
virtue we are considering has been carried, I will pass to the
|
