| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Troll Garden and Selected Stories by Willa Cather: their relation had fallen well within the painter's only
indubitable integrity. James's report of Treffinger was
distorted by no hallucination of artistic insight, colored by no
interpretation of his own. He merely held what he had heard and
seen; his mind was a sort of camera obscura. His very
limitations made him the more literal and minutely accurate.
One morning, when MacMaster was seated before the Marriage
of Phaedra, James entered on his usual round of dusting.
"I've 'eard from Lydy Elling by the post, sir," he remarked,
"an' she's give h'orders to 'ave the 'ouse put in readiness. I
doubt she'll be 'ere by Thursday or Friday next."
The Troll Garden and Selected Stories |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Silverado Squatters by Robert Louis Stevenson: taste.
In this wild spot, I did not feel the sacredness of ancient
cultivation. It was still raw, it was no Marathon, and no
Johannisberg; yet the stirring sunlight, and the growing
vines, and the vats and bottles in the cavern, made a
pleasant music for the mind. Here, also, earth's cream was
being skimmed and garnered; and the London customers can
taste, such as it is, the tang of the earth in this green
valley. So local, so quintessential is a wine, that it seems
the very birds in the verandah might communicate a flavour,
and that romantic cellar influence the bottle next to be
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: seeking after something more than is to be found in her?
That is very likely, he said.
That is very likely, I said; and very likely, too, we have been enquiring
to no purpose; as I am led to infer, because I observe that if this is
wisdom, some strange consequences would follow. Let us, if you please,
assume the possibility of this science of sciences, and further admit and
allow, as was originally suggested, that wisdom is the knowledge of what we
know and do not know. Assuming all this, still, upon further
consideration, I am doubtful, Critias, whether wisdom, such as this, would
do us much good. For we were wrong, I think, in supposing, as we were
saying just now, that such wisdom ordering the government of house or state
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