| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Statesman by Plato: given by the blending of colours. Now to intelligent persons a living
being had better be delineated by language and discourse than by any
painting or work of art: to the duller sort by works of art.
YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true; but what is the imperfection which still
remains? I wish that you would tell me.
STRANGER: The higher ideas, my dear friend, can hardly be set forth except
through the medium of examples; every man seems to know all things in a
dreamy sort of way, and then again to wake up and to know nothing.
YOUNG SOCRATES: What do you mean?
STRANGER: I fear that I have been unfortunate in raising a question about
our experience of knowledge.
Statesman |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: willing compromise. The woman must be talented as a woman,
and it will not much matter although she is talented in
nothing else. She must know her METIER DE FEMME, and have a
fine touch for the affections. And it is more important that
a person should be a good gossip, and talk pleasantly and
smartly of common friends and the thousand and one nothings of
the day and hour, than that she should speak with the tongues
of men and angels; for a while together by the fire, happens
more frequently in marriage than the presence of a
distinguished foreigner to dinner. That people should laugh
over the same sort of jests, and have many a story of "grouse
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: and majordomo, a Mr. V. S. (I warn you he is of noble
extraction), will present himself before you, reporting the
arrival of the small sledge which will take you here on the next
day. I send with him my heaviest fur, which I suppose with such
overcoats as you may have with you will keep you from freezing on
the road."
Sure enough, as I was dining, served by a Hebrew waiter, in an
enormous barn-like bedroom with a freshly painted floor, the door
opened and, in a travelling costume of long boots, big sheepskin
cap, and a short coat girt with a leather belt, the Mr. V. S. (of
noble extraction), a man of about thirty-five, appeared with an
A Personal Record |
