| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Heroes by Charles Kingsley: Then he turned to his kings, and said, 'This may stand over
till to-morrow. To-night we will feast our guests, and hear
the story of all their wanderings, and how they came hither
out of the ocean.'
So Alcinous bade the servants take the heroes in, and bathe
them, and give them clothes. And they were glad when they
saw the warm water, for it was long since they had bathed.
And they washed off the sea-salt from their limbs, and
anointed themselves from head to foot with oil, and combed
out their golden hair. Then they came back again into the
hall, while the merchant kings rose up to do them honour.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: the Same, and true opinion by the circle of the Other; and conversely the
motions of the world-animal reappear in man; its amorphous state continues
in the child, and in both disorder and chaos are gradually succeeded by
stability and order. It is not however to passages like these that Plato
is referring when he speaks of the uncertainty of his subject, but rather
to the composition of bodies, to the relations of colours, the nature of
diseases, and the like, about which he truly feels the lamentable ignorance
prevailing in his own age.
We are led by Plato himself to regard the Timaeus, not as the centre or
inmost shrine of the edifice, but as a detached building in a different
style, framed, not after the Socratic, but after some Pythagorean model.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Voice of the City by O. Henry: many, of course, who go their ways, making money,
without turning to the right or the left, but there is a
tribe abroad wonderfully composed, like the Martians,
solely of eyes and means of locomotion.
These devotees of curiosity swarm, like flies, in a
moment in a struggling, breathless circle about the
scene of an unusual occurrence. If a workman opens
a manhole, if a street car runs over a man from
North Tarrytown, if a little boy drops an egg on
his way home from the grocery, if a casual house or
two drops into the subway, if a lady loses a nickel
The Voice of the City |
