| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Ballads by Robert Louis Stevenson: And a boy, a climber of trees: all the hopes of his house.
Unwary, with open hands, he slept in the midst of his folk,
And dreamed that he heard a voice crying without, and awoke,
Leaping blindly afoot like one from a dream that he fears.
A hellish glow and clouds were about him; - it roared in his ears
Like the sound of the cataract fall that plunges sudden and steep;
And Rahero swayed as he stood, and his reason was still asleep.
Now the flame struck hard on the house, wind-wielded, a fracturing blow,
And the end of the roof was burst and fell on the sleepers below;
And the lofty hall, and the feast, and the prostrate bodies of folk,
Shone red in his eyes a moment, and then were swallowed of smoke.
Ballads |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Voyage to Abyssinia by Father Lobo: properly, hides itself under ground. We walked along its side,
sometimes seven or eight leagues without seeing any water, and then
we found it rising out of the ground, at which places we never
failed to drink as much as we could, and fill our bottles.
In our march, there fell out an unlucky accident, which, however,
did not prove of the bad consequence it might have done. The master
of our camels was an old Mohammedan, who had conceived an opinion
that it was an act of merit to do us all the mischief he could; and
in pursuance of his notion, made it his chief employment to steal
everything he could lay hold on; his piety even transported him so
far, that one morning he stole and hid the cords of our tents. The
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lysis by Plato: presence of good arouses the desire of good in that thing; but the presence
of evil, which makes a thing evil, takes away the desire and friendship of
the good; for that which was once both good and evil has now become evil
only, and the good was supposed to have no friendship with the evil?
None.
And therefore we say that those who are already wise, whether Gods or men,
are no longer lovers of wisdom; nor can they be lovers of wisdom who are
ignorant to the extent of being evil, for no evil or ignorant person is a
lover of wisdom. There remain those who have the misfortune to be
ignorant, but are not yet hardened in their ignorance, or void of
understanding, and do not as yet fancy that they know what they do not
Lysis |
