| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Nada the Lily by H. Rider Haggard: is no hope, for the king looks on me no more. I grieve for you, but I
had this one alone, and flesh is nearest to flesh. Think you that I
shall escape? I tell you nay. I am but spared for a little, then I go
where the others have gone. Chaka has marked me for the grave; for a
little while I may be left, then I die: he does but play with me as a
leopard plays with a wounded buck. I care not, I am weary, but I
grieve for the boy; there was no such boy in the land. Would that I
might die swiftly and go to seek him."
"And if the boy is not dead, Baleka, what then?"
"What is that you said?" she answered, turning on me with wild eyes.
"Oh, say it again--again, Mopo! I would gladly die a hundred deaths to
Nada the Lily |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Records of a Family of Engineers by Robert Louis Stevenson: indication of life and habitation on the Bell Rock, conveying
the momentary idea of the conversion of this fatal rock, from
being a terror to the mariner, into a residence of man and a
safeguard to shipping.
Upon narrowly examining the great iron stanchions with
which the beams were fixed to the rock, the writer had the
satisfaction of finding that there was not the least
appearance of working or shifting at any of the joints or
places of connection; and, excepting the loosening of the
bracing-chains, everything was found in the same entire state
in which it had been left in the month of October. This, in
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche: different origin!"--this may be a strange and foolish task, but
that it is a TASK, who can deny! Why did we choose it, this
foolish task? Or, to put the question differently: "Why knowledge
at all?" Every one will ask us about this. And thus pressed, we,
who have asked ourselves the question a hundred times, have not
found and cannot find any better answer....
231. Learning alters us, it does what all nourishment does that
does not merely "conserve"--as the physiologist knows. But at the
bottom of our souls, quite "down below," there is certainly
something unteachable, a granite of spiritual fate, of
predetermined decision and answer to predetermined, chosen
Beyond Good and Evil |
