| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from King Henry VI by William Shakespeare: And would my father had left me no more;
For all the rest is held at such a rate
As brings a thousand-fold more care to keep
Than in possession any jot of pleasure.--
Ah, cousin York! would thy best friends did know
How it doth grieve me that thy head is here!
QUEEN MARGARET.
My lord, cheer up your spirits;
our foes are nigh,
And this soft courage makes your followers faint.
You promis'd knighthood to our forward son;
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells: it, altogether, was a far more essential reality, a self less
personal, less individualised, and broader in its references. Its
aims were never simply to get on; it had an altogether different
system of demands and satisfactions. It was critical, curious, more
than a little unfeeling--and relentlessly illuminating.
It is just the existence and development of this more generalised
self-behind-the-frontage that is making modern life so much more
subtle and intricate to render, and so much more hopeful in its
relations to the perplexities of the universe. I see this mental
and spiritual hinterland vary enormously in the people about me,
from a type which seems to keep, as people say, all its goods in the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Ferragus by Honore de Balzac: for kings, and for private interests. But the peoples decipher no
principles but those that are writ in blood, and the evils of legality
will always be pacific; it flattens a nation down, that is all.
Jacquet, a man of modern liberty, returned home reflecting on the
benefits of arbitrary power.
When he went with his report to Jules, he found it necessary to
deceive him, for the unhappy man was in a high fever, unable to leave
his bed. The minister of the Interior mentioned, at a ministerial
dinner that same evening, the singular fancy of a Parisian in wishing
to burn his wife after the manner of the Romans. The clubs of Paris
took up the subject, and talked for a while of the burials of
Ferragus |
