| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: expression? Is the soul related to the body as sight to the eye, or as the
boatman to his boat? (Arist. de Anim.) And in another state of being is
the soul to be conceived of as vanishing into infinity, hardly possessing
an existence which she can call her own, as in the pantheistic system of
Spinoza: or as an individual informing another body and entering into new
relations, but retaining her own character? (Compare Gorgias.) Or is the
opposition of soul and body a mere illusion, and the true self neither soul
nor body, but the union of the two in the 'I' which is above them? And is
death the assertion of this individuality in the higher nature, and the
falling away into nothingness of the lower? Or are we vainly attempting to
pass the boundaries of human thought? The body and the soul seem to be
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Edition of The Ambassadors by Henry James: called it, even to a greater degree than Madame de Vionnet's old
high salon where the ghost of the Empire walked. "The" thing was
the thing that implied the greatest number of other things of the
sort he had had to tackle; and it was queer of course, but so it
was--the implication here was complete. Not a single one of his
observations but somehow fell into a place in it; not a breath of
the cooler evening that wasn't somehow a syllable of the text.
The text was simply, when condensed, that in THESE places such
things were, and that if it was in them one elected to move about
one had to make one's account with what one lighted on. Meanwhile
at all events it was enough that they did affect one--so far as the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Phantasmagoria and Other Poems by Lewis Carroll: I now remember all about it;
I wrote the thing myself.
"It came out in a 'Monthly,' or
At least my agent said it did:
Some literary swell, who saw
It, thought it seemed adapted for
The Magazine he edited.
"My father was a Brownie, Sir;
My mother was a Fairy.
The notion had occurred to her,
The children would be happier,
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