| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Figure in the Carpet by Henry James: me!"
I hesitated. "About India?"
"About fiddlesticks! About Vereker - about the figure in the
carpet."
"But, as you say, we shall surely have that in a letter."
She thought like one inspired, and I remembered how Corvick had
told me long before that her face was interesting. "Perhaps it
can't be got into a letter if it's 'immense.'"
"Perhaps not if it's immense bosh. If he has hold of something
that can't be got into a letter he hasn't hold of THE thing.
Vereker's own statement to me was exactly that the 'figure' WOULD
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Montezuma's Daughter by H. Rider Haggard: the prisoners at its summit, none of them remained alive upon the
teocalli; indeed so great a terror took them, that bearing with
them their dead and wounded, they retreated under cover of the
night to their camp without the walls of the courtyard.
Now, weary but triumphant, we wended back towards the crest of the
pyramid, but as I turned the corner of the second angle that was
perhaps nearly one hundred feet above the level of the ground, a
thought struck me and I set those with me at a task. Loosening the
blocks of stone that formed the edge of the roadway, we rolled them
down the sides of the pyramid, and so laboured on removing layer
upon layer of stones and of the earth beneath, till where the path
Montezuma's Daughter |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Parmenides by Plato: portion only?
Impossible.
Or suppose one of us to have a portion of smallness; this is but a part of
the small, and therefore the absolutely small is greater; if the absolutely
small be greater, that to which the part of the small is added will be
smaller and not greater than before.
How absurd!
Then in what way, Socrates, will all things participate in the ideas, if
they are unable to participate in them either as parts or wholes?
Indeed, he said, you have asked a question which is not easily answered.
Well, said Parmenides, and what do you say of another question?
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