| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: them a union of fire and water which we call tears. The inner fire flashes
forth, and the outer finds a way in and is extinguished in the moisture,
and all sorts of colours are generated by the mixture. This affection is
termed by us dazzling, and the object which produces it is called bright.
There is yet another sort of fire which mingles with the moisture of the
eye without flashing, and produces a colour like blood--to this we give the
name of red. A bright element mingling with red and white produces a
colour which we call auburn. The law of proportion, however, according to
which compound colours are formed, cannot be determined scientifically or
even probably. Red, when mingled with black and white, gives a purple hue,
which becomes umber when the colours are burnt and there is a larger
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: advance has been effected. Our tame stars are to come out in
future, not one by one, but all in a body and at once. A
sedate electrician somewhere in a back office touches a spring
- and behold! from one end to another of the city, from east
to west, from the Alexandra to the Crystal Palace, there is
light! FIAT LUX, says the sedate electrician. What a
spectacle, on some clear, dark nightfall, from the edge of
Hampstead Hill, when in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye,
the design of the monstrous city flashes into vision - a
glittering hieroglyph many square miles in extent; and when,
to borrow and debase an image, all the evening street-lamps
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Prufrock/Other Observations by T. S. Eliot: There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
Prufrock/Other Observations |
