| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Puck of Pook's Hill by Rudyard Kipling: through the snow behind the tall Winged Hats.
'In this fashion then, slowly, a day at a time, which is
very bad for doubting troops, the War came upon us. At
first the Winged Hats swept in from the sea as they had
done before, and there we met them as before - with the
catapults; and they sickened of it. Yet for a long time they
would not trust their duck-legs on land, and I think,
when it came to revealing the secrets of the tribe, the little
Picts were afraid or ashamed to show them all the roads
across the heather. I had this from a Pict prisoner. They
were as much our spies as our enemies, for the Winged
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Firm of Nucingen by Honore de Balzac: small-natured and silly to gain such a hold upon a man. Beaudenord
actually loved the solemn old Wirth--he has told me so himself!
"That old rogue regarded his future master with the awe which a good
Catholic feels for the Eucharist. Honest Wirth was a kind of Gaspard,
a beer-drinking German sheathing his cunning in good-nature, much as a
cardinal in the Middle Ages kept his dagger up his sleeve. Wirth saw a
husband for Isaure, and accordingly proceeded to surround Godefroid
with the mazy circumlocutions of his Alsacien's geniality, that most
adhesive of all known varieties of bird-lime.
"Mme. d'Aldrigger was radically 'improper.' She thought love the most
natural thing imaginable. When Isaure and Malvina went out together to
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lysis by Plato: intermediate 'indifferent' position the philosopher or lover of wisdom
stands: he is not wise, and yet not unwise, but he has ignorance
accidentally clinging to him, and he yearns for wisdom as the cure of the
evil. (Symp.)
After this explanation has been received with triumphant accord, a fresh
dissatisfaction begins to steal over the mind of Socrates: Must not
friendship be for the sake of some ulterior end? and what can that final
cause or end of friendship be, other than the good? But the good is
desired by us only as the cure of evil; and therefore if there were no evil
there would be no friendship. Some other explanation then has to be
devised. May not desire be the source of friendship? And desire is of
Lysis |
