| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Lesson of the Master by Henry James: made no allusion of course to their important discussion. He spoke
of his wife as frankly and generously as if he had quite forgotten
that occasion, and the feeling of deep bereavement was visible in
his words. "She took everything off my hands - off my mind. She
carried on our life with the greatest art, the rarest devotion, and
I was free, as few men can have been, to drive my pen, to shut
myself up with my trade. This was a rare service - the highest she
could have rendered me. Would I could have acknowledged it more
fitly!"
A certain bewilderment, for our hero, disengaged itself from these
remarks: they struck him as a contradiction, a retractation,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lesser Hippias by Plato: person was made by yourself. You began with your ring, which was of your
own workmanship, and you said that you could engrave rings; and you had
another seal which was also of your own workmanship, and a strigil and an
oil flask, which you had made yourself; you said also that you had made the
shoes which you had on your feet, and the cloak and the short tunic; but
what appeared to us all most extraordinary and a proof of singular art, was
the girdle of your tunic, which, you said, was as fine as the most costly
Persian fabric, and of your own weaving; moreover, you told us that you had
brought with you poems, epic, tragic, and dithyrambic, as well as prose
writings of the most various kinds; and you said that your skill was also
pre-eminent in the arts which I was just now mentioning, and in the true
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot: Departed, have left no addresses.
Line 161 ALRIGHT. This spelling occurs also in
the Hogarth Press edition -- Editor.
By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept . . .
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,
Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.
But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.
A rat crept softly through the vegetation
Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
While I was fishing in the dull canal
The Waste Land |
