| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Allan Quatermain by H. Rider Haggard: to think (and it is a bad habit) will naturally skip. It seems
to me very desirable that we should sometimes try to understand
the limitations of our nature, so that we may not be carried
away by the pride of knowledge. Man's cleverness is almost indefinite,
and stretches like an elastic band, but human nature is like
an iron ring. You can go round and round it, you can polish
it highly, you can even flatten it a little on one side, whereby
you will make it bulge out the other, but you will never, while
the world endures and man is man, increase its total circumference.
It is the one fixed unchangeable thing -- fixed as the stars,
more enduring than the mountains, as unalterable as the way of
Allan Quatermain |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Symposium by Xenophon: modest?
[52] Or, "that by largess of beauty he can enthrall his lover."
[53] See Plat. "Symp." 182 A, 192 A.
I have a longing, Callias, by mythic argument[54] to show you that not
men only, but gods and heroes, set greater store by friendship of the
soul than bodily enjoyment. Thus those fair women[55] whom Zeus,
enamoured of their outward beauty, wedded, he permitted mortal to
remain; but those heroes whose souls he held in admiration, these he
raised to immortality. Of whom are Heracles and the Dioscuri, and
there are others also named.[56] As I maintain, it was not for his
body's sake, but for his soul's, that Ganymede[57] was translated to
The Symposium |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Drama on the Seashore by Honore de Balzac: our landlady and telling him to take the lobster and the crab to her
house.
"Do you earn enough to live on?" I asked the man, in order to discover
the cause of his evident penury.
"With great hardships, and always poorly," he replied. "Fishing on the
coast, when one hasn't a boat or deep-sea nets, nothing but pole and
line, is a very uncertain business. You see we have to wait for the
fish, or the shell-fish; whereas a real fisherman puts out to sea for
them. It is so hard to earn a living this way that I'm the only man in
these parts who fishes along-shore. I spend whole days without getting
anything. To catch a crab, it must go to sleep, as this one did, and a
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