| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: for which Socrates professed only to seek dimly and afar off, and had
got it safe in a dogma, preserved as it were in spirits, and put by in a
museum, the great use of dialectic was to confute opponents. Delight in
their own subtlety grew on them, the worship not of objective truth, but
of the forms of the intellect whereby it may be demonstrated; till they
became the veriest word-splitters, rivals of the old sophists whom their
master had attacked, and justified too often Aristophanes' calumny,
which confounded Socrates with his opponents, as a man whose aim was to
make the worse appear the better reason.
We have here, in both parties, all the marks of an age of exhaustion, of
scepticism, of despair about finding any real truth. No wonder that
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Lone Star Ranger by Zane Grey: same as it had been; but the inner life had tremendously
changed. He could never become a happy man, he could never
shake utterly those haunting phantoms that had once been his
despair and madness; but he had assumed a task impossible for
any man save one like him, he had felt the meaning of it grow
strangely and wonderfully, and through that flourished up
consciousness of how passionately he now clung to this thing
which would blot out his former infamy. The iron fetters no
more threatened his hands; the iron door no more haunted his
dreams. He never forgot that he was free. Strangely, too, along
with this feeling of new manhood there gathered the force of
The Lone Star Ranger |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad: "The fellow didn't know anything of Verloc's death. Of course! He
never looks at the newspapers. They make him too sad, he says.
But never mind. I walked into his cottage. Not a soul anywhere.
I had to shout half-a-dozen times before he answered me. I thought
he was fast asleep yet, in bed. But not at all. He had been
writing his book for four hours already. He sat in that tiny cage
in a litter of manuscript. There was a half-eaten raw carrot on
the table near him. His breakfast. He lives on a diet of raw
carrots and a little milk now."
"How does he look on it?" asked Comrade Ossipon listlessly.
"Angelic. . . . I picked up a handful of his pages from the floor.
The Secret Agent |
