| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Sentimental Journey by Laurence Sterne: really I had forgot that resource.
Now the event I treated gaily came seriously to my door.
Is it folly, or nonchalance, or philosophy, or pertinacity - or
what is it in me, that, after all, when La Fleur had gone down
stairs, and I was quite alone, I could not bring down my mind to
think of it otherwise than I had then spoken of it to Eugenius?
- And as for the Bastile; the terror is in the word. - Make the
most of it you can, said I to myself, the Bastile is but another
word for a tower; - and a tower is but another word for a house you
can't get out of. - Mercy on the gouty! for they are in it twice a
year. - But with nine livres a day, and pen and ink, and paper, and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: theory of ideas is spoken of as a doctrine held not by Plato, but by
another sect of philosophers, called 'the Friends of Ideas,' probably the
Megarians, who were very distinct from him, if not opposed to him
(Sophist). Nor in what may be termed Plato's abridgement of the history of
philosophy (Soph.), is any mention made such as we find in the first book
of Aristotle's Metaphysics, of the derivation of such a theory or of any
part of it from the Pythagoreans, the Eleatics, the Heracleiteans, or even
from Socrates. In the Philebus, probably one of the latest of the Platonic
Dialogues, the conception of a personal or semi-personal deity expressed
under the figure of mind, the king of all, who is also the cause, is
retained. The one and many of the Phaedrus and Theaetetus is still working
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving: region, and seems to be commander-in-chief of all the powers of
the air, is the apparition of a figure on horseback, without a
head. It is said by some to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper,
whose head had been carried away by a cannon-ball, in some
nameless battle during the Revolutionary War, and who is ever and
anon seen by the country folk hurrying along in the gloom of
night, as if on the wings of the wind. His haunts are not
confined to the valley, but extend at times to the adjacent
roads, and especially to the vicinity of a church at no great
distance. Indeed, certain of the most authentic historians of
those parts, who have been careful in collecting and collating
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow |
