| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Protagoras by Plato: I said: I wonder whether you know what you are doing?
And what am I doing?
You are going to commit your soul to the care of a man whom you call a
Sophist. And yet I hardly think that you know what a Sophist is; and if
not, then you do not even know to whom you are committing your soul and
whether the thing to which you commit yourself be good or evil.
I certainly think that I do know, he replied.
Then tell me, what do you imagine that he is?
I take him to be one who knows wise things, he replied, as his name
implies.
And might you not, I said, affirm this of the painter and of the carpenter
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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: towards Arundel, and would come tramping back through the still keen
moonlight singing and shouting. We formed romantic friendships with
one another, and grieved more or less convincingly that there were
no splendid women fit to be our companions in the world. But
Hatherleigh, it seemed, had once known a girl whose hair was
gloriously red. "My God!" said Hatherleigh to convey the quality of
her; just simply and with projectile violence: "My God!
Benton had heard of a woman who lived with a man refusing to be
married to him--we thought that splendid beyond measure,--I cannot
now imagine why. She was "like a tender goddess," Benton said. A
sort of shame came upon us in the dark in spite of our liberal
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Troll Garden and Selected Stories by Willa Cather: of change. The clean profiles of the musicians, the gloss of
their linen, the dull black of their coats, the beloved shapes of
the instruments, the patches of yellow light thrown by the green-
shaded lamps on the smooth, varnished bellies of the cellos and
the bass viols in the rear, the restless, wind-tossed forest of
fiddle necks and bows-I recalled how, in the first orchestra I
had ever heard, those long bow strokes seemed to draw the heart
out of me, as a conjurer's stick reels out yards of paper ribbon
from a hat.
The first number was the Tannhauser overture. When the
horns drew out the first strain of the Pilgrim's chorus my Aunt
The Troll Garden and Selected Stories |
