| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Edingburgh Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson: mountainous cloud, as large as a parish, travels before
the wind; the wind itself ruffles the wood and standing
corn, and sends pulses of varying colour across the
landscape. So you sit, like Jupiter upon Olympus, and
look down from afar upon men's life. The city is as
silent as a city of the dead: from all its humming
thoroughfares, not a voice, not a footfall, reaches you
upon the hill. The sea-surf, the cries of ploughmen, the
streams and the mill-wheels, the birds and the wind, keep
up an animated concert through the plain; from farm to
farm, dogs and crowing cocks contend together in
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbot: more and more oval to your view, and at last when you have placed
your eye exactly on the edge of the table (so that you are,
as it were, actually a Flatlander) the penny will then have ceased
to appear oval at all, and will have become, so far as you can see,
a straight line.
The same thing would happen if you were to treat in the same way
a Triangle, or Square, or any other figure cut out of pasteboard.
As soon as you look at it with your eye on the edge on the table,
you will find that it ceases to appear to you a figure,
and that it becomes in appearance a straight line. Take for example
an equilateral Triangle -- who represents with us a Tradesman
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Aeneid by Virgil: There stands a tree; the queen of Stygian Jove
Claims it her own; thick woods and gloomy night
Conceal the happy plant from human sight.
One bough it bears; but (wondrous to behold!)
The ductile rind and leaves of radiant gold:
This from the vulgar branches must be torn,
And to fair Proserpine the present borne,
Ere leave be giv'n to tempt the nether skies.
The first thus rent a second will arise,
And the same metal the same room supplies.
Look round the wood, with lifted eyes, to see
Aeneid |
