| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Ion by Plato: chain of magnetic rings suspended from one another, and from a magnet. The
magnet is the Muse, and the ring which immediately follows is the poet
himself; from him are suspended other poets; there is also a chain of
rhapsodes and actors, who also hang from the Muses, but are let down at the
side; and the last ring of all is the spectator. The poet is the inspired
interpreter of the God, and this is the reason why some poets, like Homer,
are restricted to a single theme, or, like Tynnichus, are famous for a
single poem; and the rhapsode is the inspired interpreter of the poet, and
for a similar reason some rhapsodes, like Ion, are the interpreters of
single poets.
Ion is delighted at the notion of being inspired, and acknowledges that he
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett: our little families an' plenty o' cares. We were always lookin'
forward to the time we could see each other more. Now and then
she'd get out to the island for a few days while her husband'd go
fishin'; and once he stopped with her an' two children, and
made him some flakes right there and cured all his fish for winter.
We did have a beautiful time together, sister an' me; she used to
look back to it long's she lived.
"I do love to look over there where she used to live," Mrs.
Blackett went on as we began to go down the hill. "It seems as if
she must still be there, though she's long been gone. She loved
their farm,--she didn't see how I got so used to our island; but
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Reason Discourse by Rene Descartes: debated in the schools, nor in general anything the knowledge of which is
not so natural to our minds that no one can so much as imagine himself
ignorant of it. Besides, I have pointed out what are the laws of nature;
and, with no other principle upon which to found my reasonings except the
infinite perfection of God, I endeavored to demonstrate all those about
which there could be any room for doubt, and to prove that they are such,
that even if God had created more worlds, there could have been none in
which these laws were not observed. Thereafter, I showed how the greatest
part of the matter of this chaos must, in accordance with these laws,
dispose and arrange itself in such a way as to present the appearance of
heavens; how in the meantime some of its parts must compose an earth and
Reason Discourse |
