| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Walking by Henry David Thoreau: extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really
knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?
My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe
my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and
constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but
Sympathy with Intelligence. I do not know that this higher
knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and
grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all
that we called Knowledge before--a discovery that there are more
things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.
It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. Man cannot KNOW in
Walking |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Malbone: An Oldport Romance by Thomas Wentworth Higginson: make faces at her. I suppose they are faces; I do not
understand their anatomy, but it must be a very unpleasant
one."
"You are not quite satisfied with life, today, dear," said
Kate; "I fear your book did not end to your satisfaction."
"It did end, though," said the lady, "and that is something.
What is there in life so difficult as to stop a book?" If I
wrote one, it would be as long as ten 'Sir Charles Grandisons,'
and then I never should end it, because I should die. And there
would be nobody left to read it, because each reader would have
been dead long before."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Amy Foster by Joseph Conrad: all our heads--over all our heads. . . ."
The tired chestnut dropped into a walk; and the
rim of the sun, all red in a speckless sky, touched
familiarly the smooth top of a ploughed rise near
the road as I had seen it times innumerable touch
the distant horizon of the sea. The uniform
brownness of the harrowed field glowed with a rosy
tinge, as though the powdered clods had sweated
out in minute pearls of blood the toil of uncounted
ploughmen. From the edge of a copse a waggon
with two horses was rolling gently along the ridge.
Amy Foster |
