| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: rhymes; but when it comes to honest work, when we come to
gather ourselves together for an effort, we may sound the
trumpet as loud and long as we please; the great barons of the
mind will not rally to the standard, but sit, each one, at
home, warming his hands over his own fire and brooding on his
own private thought!
In the course of a day's walk, you see, there is much
variance in the mood. From the exhilaration of the start, to
the happy phlegm of the arrival, the change is certainly
great. As the day goes on, the traveller moves from the one
extreme towards the other. He becomes more and more
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Aspern Papers by Henry James: of the disposition to put up with my company for the sake of my dollars.
I said to myself that after all I could not abandon Miss Tita, and I continued
to say this even while I observed that she quite failed to comply with my
earnest request (I had given her two or three addresses, at little towns,
post restante) that she would let me know how she was getting on.
I would have made my servant write to me but that he was unable to manage
a pen. It struck me there was a kind of scorn in Miss Tita's silence
(little disdainful as she had ever been), so that I was uncomfortable
and sore. I had scruples about going back and yet I had others
about not doing so, for I wanted to put myself on a better footing.
The end of it was that I did return to Venice on the twelfth day;
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Parmenides by Plato: whole or one. And if the others have parts, they must partake of the
whole, and must be the whole of which they are the parts. And each part,
as the word 'each' implies, is also an absolute one. And both the whole
and the parts partake of one, for the whole of which the parts are parts is
one, and each part is one part of the whole; and whole and parts as
participating in one are other than one, and as being other than one are
many and infinite; and however small a fraction you separate from them is
many and not one. Yet the fact of their being parts furnishes the others
with a limit towards other parts and towards the whole; they are finite and
also infinite: finite through participation in the one, infinite in their
own nature. And as being finite, they are alike; and as being infinite,
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