| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: sense he is harmed by courage, but when he has sense he is profited?
MENO: True.
SOCRATES: And the same may be said of temperance and quickness of
apprehension; whatever things are learned or done with sense are
profitable, but when done without sense they are hurtful?
MENO: Very true.
SOCRATES: And in general, all that the soul attempts or endures, when
under the guidance of wisdom, ends in happiness; but when she is under the
guidance of folly, in the opposite?
MENO: That appears to be true.
SOCRATES: If then virtue is a quality of the soul, and is admitted to be
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Prince of Bohemia by Honore de Balzac: as a /feuilleton/, blithe as only those can be that are deep in debt
and drink deep to match, and finally--for here I come to my point--hot
lovers and what lovers! Picture to yourself Lovelace, and Henri
Quatre, and the Regent, and Werther, and Saint-Preux, and Rene, and
the Marechal de Richelieu--think of all these in a single man, and you
will have some idea of their way of love. What lovers! Eclectic of all
things in love, they will serve up a passion to a woman's order; their
hearts are like a bill of fare in a restaurant. Perhaps they have
never read Stendhal's /De l'Amour/, but unconsciously they put it in
practice. They have by heart their chapters--Love-Taste, Love-Passion,
Love-Caprice, Love-Crystalized, and more than all, Love-Transient. All
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: that she did not know this Carrie who built a new billiard room. But
how strange, she repeated, to Mr Bankes's amusement, that they should
be going on there still. For it was extraordinary to think that they
had been capable of going on living all these years when she had not
thought of them more than once all that time. How eventful her own
life had been, during those same years. Yet perhaps Carrie had not
thought about her, either. The thought was strange and distasteful.
"People soon drift apart," said Mr Bankes, feeling, however, some
satisfaction when he thought that after all he knew both the Mannings
and the Ramsays. He had not drifted apart he thought, laying down his
spoon and wiping his clean-shaven lips punctiliously. But perhaps he
To the Lighthouse |
