| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: small difference whether he die five thousand years, or five
thousand and fifty years, before the good epoch for which he
faithfully labours. He has not deceived himself; he has known
from the beginning that he followed the pillar of fire and
cloud, only to perish himself in the wilderness, and that it
was reserved for others to enter joyfully into possession of
the land. And so, as everything grows grayer and quieter
about him, and slopes towards extinction, these unfaded
visions accompany his sad decline, and follow him, with
friendly voices and hopeful words, into the very vestibule of
death. The desire of love or of fame scarcely moved him, in
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Lock and Key Library by Julian Hawthorne, Ed.: singular effect,--it seemed for some moments like an assembly of
the dead. The silence was interrupted, though the cause of wonder
had not ceased, by the entrance of Father Olavida, the Confessor of
Donna Isabella, who had been called away previous to the feast, to
administer extreme unction to a dying man in the neighborhood. He
was a priest of uncommon sanctity, beloved in the family, and
respected in the neighborhood, where he had displayed uncommon
taste and talents for exorcism;--in fact, this was the good
Father's forte, and he piqued himself on it accordingly. The devil
never fell into worse hands than Father Olavida's, for when he was
so contumacious as to resist Latin, and even the first verses of
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: the Saviour, let us begin again, and ask, in the first place, whether it is
or is not possible for a person to know that he knows and does not know
what he knows and does not know; and in the second place, whether, if
perfectly possible, such knowledge is of any use.
That is what we have to consider, he said.
And here, Critias, I said, I hope that you will find a way out of a
difficulty into which I have got myself. Shall I tell you the nature of
the difficulty?
By all means, he replied.
Does not what you have been saying, if true, amount to this: that there
must be a single science which is wholly a science of itself and of other
|
