| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Statesman by Plato: to arrive at truth. He is deeply impressed with the importance of
classification: in this alone he finds the true measure of human things;
and very often in the process of division curious results are obtained.
For the dialectical art is no respecter of persons: king and vermin-taker
are all alike to the philosopher. There may have been a time when the king
was a god, but he now is pretty much on a level with his subjects in
breeding and education. Man should be well advised that he is only one of
the animals, and the Hellene in particular should be aware that he himself
was the author of the distinction between Hellene and Barbarian, and that
the Phrygian would equally divide mankind into Phrygians and Barbarians,
and that some intelligent animal, like a crane, might go a step further,
Statesman |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honore de Balzac: essentially the country of contrasts. If true sentiments are rare
there, there also are to be found, as elsewhere, noble friendships and
unlimited devotion. On this battlefield of interests and passions,
just as in the midst of those marching societies where egoism
triumphs, where every one is obliged to defend himself, and which we
call /armies/, it seems as though sentiments liked to be complete when
they showed themselves, and are sublime by juxtaposition. So it is
with faces. In Paris one sometimes sees in the aristocracy, set like
stars, the ravishing faces of young people, the fruit of quite
exceptional manners and education. To the youthful beauty of the
English stock they unite the firmness of Southern traits. The fire of
The Girl with the Golden Eyes |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: his favourite sister, to say nothing of other kin, in numbers, had
run their course and met their end there. That represented, within
the walls, ineffaceable life.
It was a few days after this that, during an hour passed with her
again, he had expressed his impatience of the too flattering
curiosity - among the people he met - about his appreciation of New
York. He had arrived at none at all that was socially producible,
and as for that matter of his "thinking" (thinking the better or
the worse of anything there) he was wholly taken up with one
subject of thought. It was mere vain egoism, and it was moreover,
if she liked, a morbid obsession. He found all things come back to
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