| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Stories From the Old Attic by Robert Harris: consultation might be useful to the knight, to get him over his
ridiculous interest in the agreeable Arissa.
About this time it so happened that as Sir Percival was on his way
to visit Sir Wishful for a nice dinner of trout and onions, he quite
unexpectedly came upon Arissa, lovely as ever, sitting near the
village waterfall and picking her teeth. Almost out of habit, Sir
Percival spoke: "Arissa, sugar, would you like to go out with
me sometime?"
To which Arissa: "Oh, Perce, didn't I tell you I was busy?"
To which Sir Percival: "Yeah, fair one, but I thought maybe you'd
had a cancellation or something."
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz by L. Frank Baum: "But you must remember you had the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman to
help you conquer those enemies," suggested the Wizard. "Just now, my
dear, there is not a single warrior in your company."
"Oh, I guess Zeb could fight if he had to. Couldn't you, Zeb?" asked
the little girl.
"Perhaps; if I had to," answered Zeb, doubtfully.
"And you have the jointed sword that you chopped the veg'table
Sorcerer in two with," the girl said to the little man.
"True," he replied; "and in my satchel are other useful things to
fight with."
"What the Gargoyles most dread is a noise," said the man's voice.
Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Protagoras by Plato: passage--e.g. in the explanation of good as pleasure--Plato is inconsistent
with himself; or that the Dialogue fails in unity, and has not a proper
beginning, middle, and ending. They seem to forget that Plato is a
dramatic writer who throws his thoughts into both sides of the argument,
and certainly does not aim at any unity which is inconsistent with freedom,
and with a natural or even wild manner of treating his subject; also that
his mode of revealing the truth is by lights and shadows, and far-off and
opposing points of view, and not by dogmatic statements or definite
results.
The real difficulties arise out of the extreme subtlety of the work, which,
as Socrates says of the poem of Simonides, is a most perfect piece of art.
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