| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: lightly uttered. The appearances of this perishable life are
deceptive, like everything that falls under the judgment of our
imperfect senses. The inner voice may remain true enough in its
secret counsel. The fidelity to a special tradition may last
through the events of an unrelated existence, following
faithfully, too, the traced way of an inexplicable impulse.
It would take too long to explain the intimate alliance of
contradictions in human nature which makes love itself wear at
times the desperate shape of betrayal. And perhaps there is no
possible explanation. Indulgence--as somebody said--is the most
intelligent of all the virtues. I venture to think that it is
A Personal Record |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: but it was not cruelty that made Jupiter reduce Semele to ashes: it
was the fact that he could not help being a god nor she help being a
mortal. The one thing Shakespear's passion for the Dark Lady was not,
was what Mr Harris in one passage calls it: idolatrous. If it had
been, she might have been able to stand it. The man who "dotes yet
doubts, suspects, yet strongly loves," is tolerable even by a spoilt
and tyrannical mistress; but what woman could possibly endure a man
who dotes without doubting; who _knows_, and who is hugely amused at
the absurdity of his infatuation for a woman of whose mortal
imperfections not one escapes him: a man always exchanging grins with
Yorick's skull, and inviting "my lady" to laugh at the sepulchral
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gorgias by Plato: rhetoric--he is to be banished--was not that said?
GORGIAS: Yes, it was.
SOCRATES: But now we are affirming that the aforesaid rhetorician will
never have done injustice at all?
GORGIAS: True.
SOCRATES: And at the very outset, Gorgias, it was said that rhetoric
treated of discourse, not (like arithmetic) about odd and even, but about
just and unjust? Was not this said?
GORGIAS: Yes.
SOCRATES: I was thinking at the time, when I heard you saying so, that
rhetoric, which is always discoursing about justice, could not possibly be
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