| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Ion by Plato: soul, and I am persuaded that good poets by a divine inspiration interpret
the things of the Gods to us.
SOCRATES: And you rhapsodists are the interpreters of the poets?
ION: There again you are right.
SOCRATES: Then you are the interpreters of interpreters?
ION: Precisely.
SOCRATES: I wish you would frankly tell me, Ion, what I am going to ask of
you: When you produce the greatest effect upon the audience in the
recitation of some striking passage, such as the apparition of Odysseus
leaping forth on the floor, recognized by the suitors and casting his
arrows at his feet, or the description of Achilles rushing at Hector, or
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Two Brothers by Honore de Balzac: the key to many moral eccentricities. When the two are united in one
man, that man will be a cipher all his life; such double-sided
timidity makes him what we call "an imbecile." Often fine suppressed
qualities are hidden within that imbecile. To this double infirmity we
may, perhaps, owe the lives of certain monks who lived in ecstasy; for
this unfortunate moral and physical disposition is produced quite as
much by the perfection of the soul and of the organs, as by defects
which are still unstudied.
The timidity of Jean-Jacques came from a certain torpor of his
faculties, which a great teacher or a great surgeon, like Despleins,
would have roused. In him, as in the cretins, the sense of love had
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Son of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs: toward the village of Kovudoo.
On the way he came upon a herd of elephants standing in an
open forest glade. Here the trees were too far apart to permit
Korak to travel through the branches--a trail he much preferred
not only because of its freedom from dense underbrush and the wider
field of vision it gave him but from pride in his arboreal ability.
It was exhilarating to swing from tree to tree; to test the
prowess of his mighty muscles; to reap the pleasurable fruits of
his hard won agility. Korak joyed in the thrills of the highflung
upper terraces of the great forest, where, unhampered and unhindered,
he might laugh down upon the great brutes who must keep forever
The Son of Tarzan |
