| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: Did Nature supplement what man advanced? Did she complete what he
began? With equal complacence she saw his misery, his meanness, and
his torture. That dream, of sharing, completing, of finding in
solitude on the beach an answer, was then but a reflection in a mirror,
and the mirror itself was but the surface glassiness which forms in
quiescence when the nobler powers sleep beneath? Impatient, despairing
yet loth to go (for beauty offers her lures, has her consolations), to
pace the beach was impossible; contemplation was unendurable; the
mirror was broken.
[Mr Carmichael brought out a volume of poems that spring, which had an
unexpected success. The war, people said, had revived their interest
To the Lighthouse |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: a longer and better speech than Lysias, and use other arguments, then I say
again, that a statue you shall have of beaten gold, and take your place by
the colossal offerings of the Cypselids at Olympia.
SOCRATES: How profoundly in earnest is the lover, because to tease him I
lay a finger upon his love! And so, Phaedrus, you really imagine that I am
going to improve upon the ingenuity of Lysias?
PHAEDRUS: There I have you as you had me, and you must just speak 'as you
best can.' Do not let us exchange 'tu quoque' as in a farce, or compel me
to say to you as you said to me, 'I know Socrates as well as I know myself,
and he was wanting to speak, but he gave himself airs.' Rather I would
have you consider that from this place we stir not until you have unbosomed
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Three Taverns by Edwin Arlington Robinson: I told him that I did begin to see;
And I was nearer than I should have been
To laughing at his malign inclusiveness,
When I considered that, with all our speed,
We are not laughing yet at funerals.
I see him now as I could see him then,
And I see now that it was good for me,
As it was good for him, that I was quiet;
For Time's eye was on Ferguson, and the shaft
Of its inquiring hesitancy had touched him,
Or so I chose to fancy more than once
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