| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Mansfield Park by Jane Austen: or _Sir_ Edmund sound delightfully; but sink it under the chill,
the annihilation of a Mr., and Mr. Edmund is no more than
Mr. John or Mr. Thomas. Well, shall we join and disappoint
them of half their lecture upon sitting down out of doors
at this time of year, by being up before they can begin?"
Edmund met them with particular pleasure. It was the
first time of his seeing them together since the beginning
of that better acquaintance which he had been hearing
of with great satisfaction. A friendship between two so
very dear to him was exactly what he could have wished:
and to the credit of the lover's understanding, be it stated,
Mansfield Park |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: of philosophy. It is a method which does not divorce the present from the
past, or the part from the whole, or the abstract from the concrete, or
theory from fact, or the divine from the human, or one science from
another, but labours to connect them. Along such a road we have proceeded
a few steps, sufficient, perhaps, to make us reflect on the want of method
which prevails in our own day. In another age, all the branches of
knowledge, whether relating to God or man or nature, will become the
knowledge of 'the revelation of a single science' (Symp.), and all things,
like the stars in heaven, will shed their light upon one another.
MENO
by
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: call for her, and Glennard, refusing a precarious seat between the
ladies' draperies, followed on foot. The evening was
interminable. The reading at the Waldorf, at which all the women
had been present, had revived the discussion of the "Aubyn
Letters" and Glennard, hearing his wife questioned as to her
absence, felt himself miserably wishing that she had gone, rather
than that her staying away should have been remarked. He was
rapidly losing all sense of proportion where the "Letters" were
concerned. He could no longer hear them mentioned without
suspecting a purpose in the allusion; he even yielded himself for
a moment to the extravagance of imagining that Mrs. Dresham, whom
|
