| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Philosophy 4 by Owen Wister: lectures about that time. Berkeley--Berkeley. Didn't he--oh, yes! he
did. He went the whole hog. Nothing's anywhere except in your ideas.
You think the table's there, but it isn't. There isn't any table."
The first boy slapped his leg and lighted a cigarette. "I remember,"
said he. "Amounts to this: If I were to stop thinking about you, you'd
evaporate."
"Which is balls," observed the second boy, judicially, again in the
slang of his period, "and can be proved so. For you're not always
thinking about me, and I've never evaporated once."
The first boy, after a slight wink at the second, addressed the tutor.
"Supposing you were to happen to forget yourself," said he to that sleek
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories by Alice Dunbar: and microscope could talk about a cadaver. The entire Third
District, with its swamps and canals and commons and railroad
sections, and its wondrous, crooked, tortuous streets, was an
open book to Titee. There was not a nook or corner that he did
not know or could not tell of. There was not a bit of gossip
among the gamins, little Creole and Spanish fellows, with dark
skins and lovely eyes, like spaniels, that Titee could not tell
of. He knew just exactly when it was time for crawfish to be
plentiful down in the Claiborne and Marigny canals; just when a
poor, breadless fellow might get a job in the big bone-yard and
fertilising factory, out on the railroad track; and as for the
The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Republic by Plato: heaven are framed by the Creator of them in the most perfect manner? But
he will never imagine that the proportions of night and day, or of both to
the month, or of the month to the year, or of the stars to these and to one
another, and any other things that are material and visible can also be
eternal and subject to no deviation--that would be absurd; and it is
equally absurd to take so much pains in investigating their exact truth.
I quite agree, though I never thought of this before.
Then, I said, in astronomy, as in geometry, we should employ problems, and
let the heavens alone if we would approach the subject in the right way and
so make the natural gift of reason to be of any real use.
That, he said, is a work infinitely beyond our present astronomers.
The Republic |
