| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Republic by Plato: took from the finger of the dead and reascended. Now the shepherds met
together, according to custom, that they might send their monthly report
about the flocks to the king; into their assembly he came having the ring
on his finger, and as he was sitting among them he chanced to turn the
collet of the ring inside his hand, when instantly he became invisible to
the rest of the company and they began to speak of him as if he were no
longer present. He was astonished at this, and again touching the ring he
turned the collet outwards and reappeared; he made several trials of the
ring, and always with the same result--when he turned the collet inwards he
became invisible, when outwards he reappeared. Whereupon he contrived to
be chosen one of the messengers who were sent to the court; whereas soon as
The Republic |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Madam How and Lady Why by Charles Kingsley: which you have seen before; and you had seen flowers, and snakes,
and fishes' backbones, and made a very fair guess from them.
After all, some of these stalked star-fish are so like flowers,
lilies especially, that they are called Encrinites; and the whole
family is called Crinoids, or lily-like creatures, from the Greek
work KRINON, a lily; and as for corals and corallines, learned
men, in spite of all their care and shrewdness, made mistake after
mistake about them, which they had to correct again and again,
till now, I trust, they have got at something very like the truth.
No, I shall only call you silly if you do what some little boys
are apt to do--call other boys, and, still worse, servants or poor
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from 1984 by George Orwell: the Floating Fortresses which guard strategic spots on the sea lanes. In
the centres of civilization war means no more than a continuous shortage
of consumption goods, and the occasional crash of a rocket bomb which may
cause a few scores of deaths. War has in fact changed its character. More
exactly, the reasons for which war is waged have changed in their order of
importance. Motives which were already present to some small extent in the
great wars of the early twentieth centuury have now become dominant and
are consciously recognized and acted upon.
To understand the nature of the present war--for in spite of the regrouping
which occurs every few years, it is always the same war--one must realize
in the first place that it is impossible for it to be decisive. None of
1984 |
