| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Lysis by Plato: be the friend of any other thing after the destruction of evil; for the
effect cannot remain when the cause is destroyed.
True.
And have we not admitted already that the friend loves something for a
reason? and at the time of making the admission we were of opinion that the
neither good nor evil loves the good because of the evil?
Very true.
But now our view is changed, and we conceive that there must be some other
cause of friendship?
I suppose so.
May not the truth be rather, as we were saying just now, that desire is the
Lysis |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: led to the works that now amaze us on a railway journey. A
man of the unquestionable force of M. Zola spends himself on
technical successes. To afford a popular flavour and attract
the mob, he adds a steady current of what I may be allowed to
call the rancid. That is exciting to the moralist; but what
more particularly interests the artist is this tendency of
the extreme of detail, when followed as a principle, to
degenerate into mere FEUX-DE-JOIE of literary tricking. The
other day even M. Daudet was to be heard babbling of audible
colours and visible sounds.
This odd suicide of one branch of the realists may serve to
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Charmides and Other Poems by Oscar Wilde: With gaudy pennon flying passed away
Into his brazen House, and one by one
The little yellow stars began to stray
Across the field of heaven, ah! then indeed
She feared his lips upon her lips would never care to feed,
And cried, 'Awake, already the pale moon
Washes the trees with silver, and the wave
Creeps grey and chilly up this sandy dune,
The croaking frogs are out, and from the cave
The nightjar shrieks, the fluttering bats repass,
And the brown stoat with hollow flanks creeps through the dusky
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