| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: tell me, "one had freckles; another too wide a mouth; a third too
large a nose;" nothing of which I was able to distinguish. I
confess this reflection was obvious enough; which, however, I
could not forbear, lest the reader might think those vast
creatures were actually deformed: for I must do them the justice
to say, they are a comely race of people, and particularly the
features of my master's countenance, although he was but a
farmer, when I beheld him from the height of sixty feet, appeared
very well proportioned.
When dinner was done, my master went out to his labourers, and,
as I could discover by his voice and gesture, gave his wife
Gulliver's Travels |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: something else, then he is refuted and not I. For do you really suppose
that any one would admit the memory which a man has of an impression which
has passed away to be the same with that which he experienced at the time?
Assuredly not. Or would he hesitate to acknowledge that the same man may
know and not know the same thing? Or, if he is afraid of making this
admission, would he ever grant that one who has become unlike is the same
as before he became unlike? Or would he admit that a man is one at all,
and not rather many and infinite as the changes which take place in him? I
speak by the card in order to avoid entanglements of words. But, O my good
sir, he will say, come to the argument in a more generous spirit; and
either show, if you can, that our sensations are not relative and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll: (Forgetting all laws of propriety,
And that giving instruction, without introduction,
Would have caused quite a thrill in Society),
"As to temper the Jubjub's a desperate bird,
Since it lives in perpetual passion:
Its taste in costume is entirely absurd--
It is ages ahead of the fashion:
"But it knows any friend it has met once before:
It never will look at a bride:
And in charity-meetings it stands at the door,
And collects--though it does not subscribe.
The Hunting of the Snark |
