| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: instant, I know not whence, will or will not hold good to the end.
HERMOGENES: You seem to me, Socrates, to be quite like a prophet newly
inspired, and to be uttering oracles.
SOCRATES: Yes, Hermogenes, and I believe that I caught the inspiration
from the great Euthyphro of the Prospaltian deme, who gave me a long
lecture which commenced at dawn: he talked and I listened, and his wisdom
and enchanting ravishment has not only filled my ears but taken possession
of my soul,and to-day I shall let his superhuman power work and finish the
investigation of names--that will be the way; but to-morrow, if you are so
disposed, we will conjure him away, and make a purgation of him, if we can
only find some priest or sophist who is skilled in purifications of this
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: shows us our own familiar thoughts, but all turned wrong side out.
Humor holds the glass, and we become the sport of our own reflections.
But is it otherwise at home? Do not our personal presentments mock
each of us individually our lives long? Who but is the daily dupe of
his dressing-glass, and complacently conceives himself to be a very
different appearing person from what he is, forgetting that his
right side has become his left, and vice versa? Yet who, when by
chance he catches sight in like manner of the face of a friend,
can keep from smiling at the caricatures which the mirror's
left-for-right reversal makes of the asymmetry of that friend's
features,--caricatures all the more grotesque for being utterly
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: of men, in those pools of uneasy water, in which clouds for ever turn
and shadows form, dreams persisted, and it was impossible to resist the
strange intimation which every gull, flower, tree, man and woman, and
the white earth itself seemed to declare (but if questioned at once to
withdraw) that good triumphs, happiness prevails, order rules; or to
resist the extraordinary stimulus to range hither and thither in search
of some absolute good, some crystal of intensity, remote from the known
pleasures and familiar virtues, something alien to the processes of
domestic life, single, hard, bright, like a diamond in the sand, which
would render the possessor secure. Moreover, softened and acquiescent,
the spring with her bees humming and gnats dancing threw her cloak
To the Lighthouse |
