| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: power by which we rise above ourselves and the commonplaces of thought and
life. The philosophical imagination is another name for reason finding an
expression of herself in the outward world. To deprive life of ideals is
to deprive it of all higher and comprehensive aims and of the power of
imparting and communicating them to others. For men are taught, not by
those who are on a level with them, but by those who rise above them, who
see the distant hills, who soar into the empyrean. Like a bird in a cage,
the mind confined to sense is always being brought back from the higher to
the lower, from the wider to the narrower view of human knowledge. It
seeks to fly but cannot: instead of aspiring towards perfection, 'it
hovers about this lower world and the earthly nature.' It loses the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne: playing and prattling about it. Their mother was quite surprised
at this; and the longer she looked, the more and more surprised
she grew.
"What remarkable children mine are!" thought she, smiling with a
mother's pride; and, smiling at herself, too, for being so proud
of them. "What other children could have made anything so like a
little girl's figure out of snow at the first trial? Well; but
now I must finish Peony's new frock, for his grandfather is
coming to-morrow, and I want the little fellow to look handsome."
So she took up the frock, and was soon as busily at work again
with her needle as the two children with their snow-image. But
The Snow Image |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson by Robert Louis Stevenson: for it: I shoot straight at the story.
As a story, a comedy, I think OTTO very well constructed; the
echoes are very good, all the sentiments change round, and the
points of view are continually, and, I think (if you please),
happily contrasted. None of it is exactly funny, but some of it is
smiling.
R. L. S.
Letter: TO EDMUND GOSSE
LA SOLITUDE, HYERES [SUMMER 1883].
MY DEAR GOSSE, - I have now leisurely read your volume; pretty
soon, by the way, you will receive one of mine.
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