| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Don Quixote by Miquel de Cervantes: hunger, or, as I think more likely, in order to have done with such
a worthless burden as it bore in me. I was left on foot, worn out,
famishing, without anyone to help me or any thought of seeking help:
and so thus I lay stretched on the ground, how long I know not,
after which I rose up free from hunger, and found beside me some
goatherds, who no doubt were the persons who had relieved me in my
need, for they told me how they had found me, and how I had been
uttering ravings that showed plainly I had lost my reason; and since
then I am conscious that I am not always in full possession of it, but
at times so deranged and crazed that I do a thousand mad things,
tearing my clothes, crying aloud in these solitudes, cursing my
Don Quixote |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Court Life in China by Isaac Taylor Headland: my assistance in a matter which he had undertaken for the
Emperor, often brought me various kinds of meat, or other
delicacies of a like nature, from the imperial kitchens.
I want you to visit three of the imperial temples in these
beautiful palace grounds. The first is a tall, three-story
building at the head of that magnificent Lotus Lake. In it there
stands a Buddhist deity with one thousand heads and one thousand
arms and hands. Standing upon the ground floor its head reaches
almost to the roof. Its body, face and arms are as white as snow.
There is nothing else in the building--nothing but this
mild-faced Buddhist divinity for that brilliant, black-eyed ruler
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: Phaedrus, the Sophist, and the Parmenides, have more than one subject. But
it does not therefore follow that Plato intended one dialogue to succeed
another, or that he begins anew in one dialogue a subject which he has left
unfinished in another, or that even in the same dialogue he always intended
the two parts to be connected with each other. We cannot argue from a
casual statement found in the Parmenides to other statements which occur in
the Philebus. Much more truly is his own manner described by himself when
he says that 'words are more plastic than wax' (Rep.), and 'whither the
wind blows, the argument follows'. The dialogues of Plato are like poems,
isolated and separate works, except where they are indicated by the author
himself to have an intentional sequence.
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