| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad: We were all standing up now. She kept her eyes on me, and repeated
with a sort of whimsical enviousness:
"The sea! The violet sea - and he is longing to rejoin it! . . .
At night! Under the stars! . . . A lovers' meeting," she went on,
thrilling me from head to foot with those two words, accompanied by
a wistful smile pointed by a suspicion of mockery. She turned
away.
"And you, Monsieur Mills?" she asked.
"I am going back to my books," he declared with a very serious
face. "My adventure is over."
"Each one to his love," she bantered us gently. "Didn't I love
The Arrow of Gold |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lesser Hippias by Plato: endeavours to draw into a long oration. At last, he gets tired of being
defeated at every point by Socrates, and is with difficulty induced to
proceed (compare Thrasymachus, Protagoras, Callicles, and others, to whom
the same reluctance is ascribed).
Hippias like Protagoras has common sense on his side, when he argues,
citing passages of the Iliad in support of his view, that Homer intended
Achilles to be the bravest, Odysseus the wisest of the Greeks. But he is
easily overthrown by the superior dialectics of Socrates, who pretends to
show that Achilles is not true to his word, and that no similar
inconsistency is to be found in Odysseus. Hippias replies that Achilles
unintentionally, but Odysseus intentionally, speaks falsehood. But is it
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) by Dante Alighieri: Philosophising; so transporteth you
Love of appearance and the thought thereof.
And even this above here is endured
With less disdain, than when is set aside
The Holy Writ, or when it is distorted.
They think not there how much of blood it costs
To sow it in the world, and how he pleases
Who in humility keeps close to it.
Each striveth for appearance, and doth make
His own inventions; and these treated are
By preachers, and the Evangel holds its peace.
The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) |
