| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Troll Garden and Selected Stories by Willa Cather: debauchees have become martyrs; which made a tinker an artist and
a camel-driver the founder of an empire. This was with Asa Skinner
tonight, as he stood proclaiming the vengeance of God.
It might have occurred to an impartial observer that Asa
Skinner's God was indeed a vengeful God if he could reserve
vengeance for those of his creatures who were packed into the Lone
Star schoolhouse that night. Poor exiles of all nations; men from
the south and the north, peasants from almost every country of
Europe, most of them from the mountainous, night-bound coast of
Norway. Honest men for the most part, but men with whom the world
had dealt hardly; the failures of all countries, men sobered by
The Troll Garden and Selected Stories |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Wife, et al by Anton Chekhov: sum is fixed by our practical duty to a thousand families.
Meanwhile we give not three hundred and fifty a day, but only
ten, and say that that is relief, charity, that that makes your
wife and all of us exceptionally good people and hurrah for our
humaneness. That is it, my dear soul! Ah! if we would talk less
of being humane and calculated more, reasoned, and took a
conscientious attitude to our duties! How many such humane,
sensitive people there are among us who tear about in all good
faith with subscription lists, but don't pay their tailors or
their cooks. There is no logic in our life; that's what it is! No
logic!"
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lysis by Plato: professes a humorous sort of fear, and Hippothales the flighty lover, who
murders sleep by bawling out the name of his beloved; there is also a
contrast between the false, exaggerated, sentimental love of Hippothales
towards Lysis, and the childlike and innocent friendship of the boys with
one another. Some difference appears to be intended between the characters
of the more talkative Menexenus and the reserved and simple Lysis.
Socrates draws out the latter by a new sort of irony, which is sometimes
adopted in talking to children, and consists in asking a leading question
which can only be answered in a sense contrary to the intention of the
question: 'Your father and mother of course allow you to drive the
chariot?' 'No they do not.' When Menexenus returns, the serious dialectic
Lysis |
