| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo: The populace, which perceives no jest in holy deeds, was touched,
and admired him.
As for the Bishop, it was a shock to him to have beheld the guillotine,
and it was a long time before he recovered from it.
In fact, when the scaffold is there, all erected and prepared,
it has something about it which produces hallucination.
One may feel a certain indifference to the death penalty,
one may refrain from pronouncing upon it, from saying yes or no,
so long as one has not seen a guillotine with one's own eyes:
but if one encounters one of them, the shock is violent;
one is forced to decide, and to take part for or against.
Les Miserables |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Davis: barges. What wonder? When I was a child, I used to fancy a
look of weary, dumb appeal upon the face of the negro-like river
slavishly bearing its burden day after day. Something of the
same idle notion comes to me to-day, when from the street-window
I look on the slow stream of human life creeping past, night and
morning, to the great mills. Masses of men, with dull, besotted
faces bent to the ground, sharpened here and there by pain or
cunning; skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and
ashes; stooping all night over boiling caldrons of metal, laired
by day in dens of drunkenness and infamy; breathing from infancy
to death an air saturated with fog and grease and soot, vileness
Life in the Iron-Mills |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: the cure, he would be made whole; but that without the charm the leaf would
be of no avail.
Then I will write out the charm from your dictation, he said.
With my consent? I said, or without my consent?
With your consent, Socrates, he said, laughing.
Very good, I said; and are you quite sure that you know my name?
I ought to know you, he replied, for there is a great deal said about you
among my companions; and I remember when I was a child seeing you in
company with my cousin Critias.
I am glad to find that you remember me, I said; for I shall now be more at
home with you and shall be better able to explain the nature of the charm,
|
