| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad: affair the police has managed to smother so nicely, was mediocre.
And the police murdered him. He was mediocre. Everybody is
mediocre. Madness and despair! Give me that for a lever, and I'll
move the world. Ossipon, you have my cordial scorn. You are
incapable of conceiving even what the fat-fed citizen would call a
crime. You have no force." He paused, smiling sardonically under
the fierce glitter of his thick glasses.
"And let me tell you that this little legacy they say you've come
into has not improved your intelligence. You sit at your beer like
a dummy. Good-bye."
"Will you have it?" said Ossipon, looking up with an idiotic grin.
The Secret Agent |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: temperance. For there are pleasures which they are afraid of losing; and
in their desire to keep them, they abstain from some pleasures, because
they are overcome by others; and although to be conquered by pleasure is
called by men intemperance, to them the conquest of pleasure consists in
being conquered by pleasure. And that is what I mean by saying that, in a
sense, they are made temperate through intemperance.
Such appears to be the case.
Yet the exchange of one fear or pleasure or pain for another fear or
pleasure or pain, and of the greater for the less, as if they were coins,
is not the exchange of virtue. O my blessed Simmias, is there not one true
coin for which all things ought to be exchanged?--and that is wisdom; and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: language at a time when in their abstract form they had never entered into
the mind of man...If the science of Comparative Philology had possessed
'enough of Metaphysics to get rid of Metaphysics,' it would have made far
greater progress.
(4) Our knowledge of language is almost confined to languages which are
fully developed. They are of several patterns; and these become altered by
admixture in various degrees,--they may only borrow a few words from one
another and retain their life comparatively unaltered, or they may meet in
a struggle for existence until one of the two is overpowered and retires
from the field. They attain the full rights and dignity of language when
they acquire the use of writing and have a literature of their own; they
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