| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: be managed while others remain intractable. (1). The structure of the
Greek language is partly adversative and alternative, and partly
inferential; that is to say, the members of a sentence are either opposed
to one another, or one of them expresses the cause or effect or condition
or reason of another. The two tendencies may be called the horizontal and
perpendicular lines of the language; and the opposition or inference is
often much more one of words than of ideas. But modern languages have
rubbed off this adversative and inferential form: they have fewer links of
connection, there is less mortar in the interstices, and they are content
to place sentences side by side, leaving their relation to one another to
be gathered from their position or from the context. The difficulty of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Gorgias by Plato: satisfied their desires, and people say that they have made the city great,
not seeing that the swollen and ulcerated condition of the State is to be
attributed to these elder statesmen; for they have filled the city full of
harbours and docks and walls and revenues and all that, and have left no
room for justice and temperance. And when the crisis of the disorder
comes, the people will blame the advisers of the hour, and applaud
Themistocles and Cimon and Pericles, who are the real authors of their
calamities; and if you are not careful they may assail you and my friend
Alcibiades, when they are losing not only their new acquisitions, but also
their original possessions; not that you are the authors of these
misfortunes of theirs, although you may perhaps be accessories to them. A
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Dead Souls by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: badly?"
"Of course I do!" exclaimed the fellow, and added thereto an
uncomplimentary expression of a species not ordinarily employed in
polite society. We may guess that it was a pretty apt expression,
since long after the man had become lost to view Chichikov was still
laughing in his britchka. And, indeed, the language of the Russian
populace is always forcible in its phraseology.
CHAPTER VI
Chichikov's amusement at the peasant's outburst prevented him from
noticing that he had reached the centre of a large and populous
village; but, presently, a violent jolt aroused him to the fact that
Dead Souls |
