| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Parmenides by Plato: will that any longer be a whole?
No.
Then the one, as appears, will have beginning, middle, and end.
It will.
But, again, the middle will be equidistant from the extremes; or it would
not be in the middle?
Yes.
Then the one will partake of figure, either rectilinear or round, or a
union of the two?
True.
And if this is the case, it will be both in itself and in another too.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac: for carriage. The porter, a German shoemaker living in a loft,
had paid the money and kept the box. I walked up and down the Rue
des Fosses-Saint-Germain-des-Pres and the Rue de l'Ecole de
Medecine without hitting on any scheme which would release my
trunk without the payment of the forty francs, which of course I
could pay as soon as I should have sold the linen. My stupidity
proved to me that surgery was my only vocation. My good fellow,
refined souls, whose powers move in a lofty atmosphere, have none
of that spirit of intrigue that is fertile in resource and
device; their good genius is chance; they do not invent, things
come to them.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: murderous heroine of the Saga. Ibsen's aim in The Vikings was
purely theatrical, and not, as in his later dramas, also
philosophically symbolic. Wagner's aim in Siegfried's Death was
equally theatrical, and not, as it afterwards became in the
dramas of which Siegfried s antagonist Wotan is the hero,
likewise philosophically symbolic. The two master-dramatists
therefore produce practically the same version of Brynhild. Thus
on the second evening of The Ring we see Brynhild in the
character of the truth-divining instinct in religion, cast into
an enchanted slumber and surrounded by the fires of hell lest she
should overthrow a Church corrupted by its alliance with
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