| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll: through the glass in here, and can't get at me!'
Then she began looking about, and noticed that what could be
seen from the old room was quite common and uninteresting, but
that all the rest was a different as possible. For instance, the
pictures on the wall next the fire seemed to be all alive, and
the very clock on the chimney-piece (you know you can only see
the back of it in the Looking-glass) had got the face of a little
old man, and grinned at her.
`They don't keep this room so tidy as the other,' Alice thought
to herself, as she noticed several of the chessmen down in the
hearth among the cinders: but in another moment, with a little
Through the Looking-Glass |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Divine Comedy (translated by H.F. Cary) by Dante Alighieri: incomprehensible. Of this Lucifer was a proof; for had he
thoroughly comprehended it, he would not have fallen."
v. 108. The Ethiop.] Matt. c. xii. 41.
v. 112. That volume.] Rev. c. xx. 12.
v. 114. Albert.] Purgatory, Canto VI. v. 98.
v. 116. Prague.] The eagle predicts the devastation of Bohemia
by Albert, which happened soon after this time, when that Emperor
obtained the kingdom for his eldest son Rodolph. See Coxe's
House of Austria, 4to. ed. v. i. part 1. p. 87
v. 117. He.] Philip IV of France, after the battle of Courtrai,
1302, in which the French were defeated by the Flemings, raised
The Divine Comedy (translated by H.F. Cary) |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Seraphita by Honore de Balzac: cannot be interfered with by the hand of man. But after fulfilling, as
it were, the function of Matter, it would be unreasonable not to
recognize within us the existence of a gigantic power, the effects of
which are so incommensurable that the known generations of men have
never yet been able to classify them. I do not speak of man's faculty
of abstraction, of constraining Nature to confine itself within the
Word,--a gigantic act on which the common mind reflects as little as
it does on the nature of Motion, but which, nevertheless, has led the
Indian theosophists to explain creation by a word to which they give
an inverse power. The smallest atom of their subsistence, namely, the
grain of rice, from which a creation issues and in which alternately
Seraphita |
