| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Hermione's Little Group of Serious Thinkers by Don Marquis: to the Greek spirit.
She had a husband with her. He does lecture
or anything, you know.
But she isn't so very Greek-looking herself, al-
though her spirit is so Greek, so she has this Greek-
looking husband to wear the sandals and the tunics
and the togas and things.
She calls him Achilles.
It's quite proper, you know -- Achilles stays be-
hind a screen until she wants to illustrate a
point, and then he comes out with a lyre or a lute
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: like her brother, she contrived--it was the charming thing
in both children--to let me alone without appearing to drop
me and to accompany me without appearing to surround.
They were never importunate and yet never listless.
My attention to them all really went to seeing them amuse
themselves immensely without me: this was a spectacle they seemed
actively to prepare and that engaged me as an active admirer.
I walked in a world of their invention--they had no occasion whatever
to draw upon mine; so that my time was taken only with being,
for them, some remarkable person or thing that the game of
the moment required and that was merely, thanks to my superior,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass: March, it was repeated before them at their business meeting in
May--the platform, _par excellence_, on which they invite free
fight, _a l'outrance_, to all comers. It was given out in the
clear, ringing tones, wherewith the hall of shields was wont to
resound of old, yet neither Garrison, nor Phillips, nor May, nor
Remond, nor Foster, nor Burleigh, with his subtle steel of "the
ice brook's temper," ventured to break a lance upon it! The
doctrine of the dissolution of the Union, as a means for the
abolition of American slavery, was silenced upon the lips that
gave it birth, and in the presence of an array of defenders who
compose the keenest intellects in the land.
My Bondage and My Freedom |
