| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: men depend chiefly on the accidents of their bodily state. Pain soon
overpowers the desire of life; old age, like the child, is laid to sleep
almost in a moment. The long experience of life will often destroy the
interest which mankind have in it. So various are the feelings with which
different persons draw near to death; and still more various the forms in
which imagination clothes it. For this alternation of feeling compare the
Old Testament,--Psalm vi.; Isaiah; Eccles.
12. When we think of God and of man in his relation to God; of the
imperfection of our present state and yet of the progress which is
observable in the history of the world and of the human mind; of the depth
and power of our moral ideas which seem to partake of the very nature of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Prufrock/Other Observations by T. S. Eliot: Let us take the air, in a tobacco trance--
Well! and what if she should die some afternoon,
Afternoon grey and smoky, evening yellow and rose;
Should die and leave me sitting pen in hand
With the smoke coming down above the housetops;
Doubtful, for quite a while
Not knowing what to feel or if I understand
Or whether wise or foolish, tardy or too soon ...
Would she not have the advantage, after all?
This music is successful with a "dying fall"
Now that we talk of dying--
Prufrock/Other Observations |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Hellenica by Xenophon: gift the seed of Demeter's corn-fruits. How, then, can it be just or
right either that you should come and ravage the corn crops of those
from whom you got the sacred seed of corn, or that we should not
desire that they to whom the gift was given should share abundantly of
this boon? But if, as it would seem, it is a fixed decree of heaven
that war shall never cease among men, yet ought we--your people and
our people--to be as slow as possible to begin it, and being in it, as
swift as possible to bring it to an end."
[6] B.C. 387 and 374; see Curtius, "H. G." vol. iv. p. 376 (Eng. ed.)
After him Autocles[7] spoke: he was of repute as a versatile lawyer
and orator, and addressed the meeting as follows: "Lacedaemonians, I
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