| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: distress, and sees all the miseries incident to human life without a sigh
or a prayer.' (An' please your honours, cried Trim, I think this a viler
man than the other.)
'Shall not conscience rise up and sting him on such occasions?--No; thank
God there is no occasion, I pay every man his own;--I have no fornication
to answer to my conscience;--no faithless vows or promises to make up;--I
have debauched no man's wife or child; thank God, I am not as other men,
adulterers, unjust, or even as this libertine, who stands before me.
'A third is crafty and designing in his nature. View his whole life;--'tis
nothing but a cunning contexture of dark arts and unequitable subterfuges,
basely to defeat the true intent of all laws,--plain dealing and the safe
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Republic by Plato: terms 'mine' and 'not mine,' 'his' and 'not his.'
Exactly so.
And is not that the best-ordered State in which the greatest number of
persons apply the terms 'mine' and 'not mine' in the same way to the same
thing?
Quite true.
Or that again which most nearly approaches to the condition of the
individual--as in the body, when but a finger of one of us is hurt, the
whole frame, drawn towards the soul as a centre and forming one kingdom
under the ruling power therein, feels the hurt and sympathizes all together
with the part affected, and we say that the man has a pain in his finger;
The Republic |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: afterwards as it was before, and we stand in our indigent and cramped
estate, and our soul thirsts after a still ebbing elixir.' It is to
this wandering and uneasy spirit of anticipation that roads minister.
Every little vista, every little glimpse that we have of what lies
before us, gives the impatient imagination rein, so that it can
outstrip the body and already plunge into the shadow of the woods,
and overlook from the hill-top the plain beyond it, and wander in the
windings of the valleys that are still far in front. The road is
already there - we shall not be long behind. It is as if we were
marching with the rear of a great army, and, from far before, heard
the acclamation of the people as the vanguard entered some friendly
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