| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Symposium by Xenophon: olive-shoot[31] in honour of Athena?--whom else save beautiful old
men? witnessing thereby[32] that beauty walks hand in hand as a
companion with every age of life, from infancy to eld.
[30] Cf. ib. III. iii. 12.
[31] Cf. Aristoph. "Wasps," 544.
[32] Or, "beauty steps in attendance lovingly hand in hand at every
season of the life of man." So Walt Whitman, passim.
Or again, if it be sweet to win from willing hearts the things we seek
for, I am persuaded that, by the eloquence of silence, I could win a
kiss from yonder girl or boy more speedily than ever you could, O
sage! by help of half a hundred subtle arguments.
The Symposium |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sarrasine by Honore de Balzac: and her chaste caress was not without a touch of that graceful
playfulness, the secret of which only a few privileged women possess.
"/Addio, addio!/" she said, with the sweetest inflection of her young
voice.
She added to the last syllable a wonderfully executed trill, in a very
low tone, as if to depict the overflowing affection of her heart by a
poetic expression. The old man, suddenly arrested by some memory,
remained on the threshold of that secret retreat. In the profound
silence we heard the sigh that came forth form his breast; he removed
the most beautiful of the rings with which his skeleton fingers were
laden, and placed it in Marianina's bosom. The young madcap laughed,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: stroke of policy; and how much more with a whole cellar - a
whole bodily existence! People may lay down their lives with
cheerfulness in the sure expectation of a blessed immortality;
but that is a different affair from giving up youth with all
its admirable pleasures, in the hope of a better quality of
gruel in a more than problematical, nay, more than improbable,
old age. We should not compliment a hungry man, who should
refuse a whole dinner and reserve all his appetite for the
dessert, before he knew whether there was to be any dessert or
not. If there be such a thing as imprudence in the world, we
surely have it here. We sail in leaky bottoms and on great
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