| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Middlemarch by George Eliot: a leg-plaiter."
"Of course you can call it poetry if you like."
"Aha, Miss Rosy, you don't know Homer from slang. I shall invent
a new game; I shall write bits of slang and poetry on slips,
and give them to you to separate."
"Dear me, how amusing it is to hear young people talk!" said Mrs. Vincy,
with cheerful admiration.
"Have you got nothing else for my breakfast, Pritchard?" said Fred,
to the servant who brought in coffee and buttered toast;
while he walked round the table surveying the ham, potted beef,
and other cold remnants, with an air of silent rejection, and polite
Middlemarch |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Republic by Plato: habit, you will see ten thousand times better than the inhabitants of the
den, and you will know what the several images are, and what they
represent, because you have seen the beautiful and just and good in their
truth. And thus our State, which is also yours, will be a reality, and not
a dream only, and will be administered in a spirit unlike that of other
States, in which men fight with one another about shadows only and are
distracted in the struggle for power, which in their eyes is a great good.
Whereas the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant
to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in
which they are most eager, the worst.
Quite true, he replied.
The Republic |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Coxon Fund by Henry James: "He looked very nice, and you know he's really clean. Miss Anvoy
used such a remarkable expression--she said his mind's like a
crystal!"
I pricked up my ears. "A crystal?"
"Suspended in the moral world--swinging and shining and flashing
there. She's monstrously clever, you know."
I thought again. "Monstrously!"
CHAPTER VIII
George Gravener didn't follow her, for late in September, after the
House had risen, I met him in a railway-carriage. He was coming up
from Scotland and I had just quitted some relations who lived near
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