| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Lesson of the Master by Henry James: "He does so at his peril - he does so at his cost."
"Not even when his wife's in sympathy with his work?"
"She never is - she can't be! Women haven't a conception of such
things."
"Surely they on occasion work themselves," Paul objected.
"Yes, very badly indeed. Oh of course, often, they think they
understand, they think they sympathise. Then it is they're most
dangerous. Their idea is that you shall do a great lot and get a
great lot of money. Their great nobleness and virtue, their
exemplary conscientiousness as British females, is in keeping you
up to that. My wife makes all my bargains with my publishers for
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne: to be impressed by an indescribable something in that thin,
rugged, thoughtful visage, with the grizzled hair hanging wildly
about it, and those deeply sunken eyes, which gleamed like fires
within the entrance of a mysterious cavern. But, as he closed the
door, the stranger turned towards him, and spoke in a quiet,
familiar way, that made Bartram feel as if he were a sane and
sensible man, after all.
"Your task draws to an end, I see," said he. "This marble has
already been burning three days. A few hours more will convert
the stone to lime."
"Why, who are you?" exclaimed the lime-burner. "You seem as well
The Snow Image |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Republic by Plato: it was through the mathematical sciences, and these too were dependent on
it. To ask whether God was the maker of it, or made by it, would be like
asking whether God could be conceived apart from goodness, or goodness
apart from God. The God of the Timaeus is not really at variance with the
idea of good; they are aspects of the same, differing only as the personal
from the impersonal, or the masculine from the neuter, the one being the
expression or language of mythology, the other of philosophy.
This, or something like this, is the meaning of the idea of good as
conceived by Plato. Ideas of number, order, harmony, development may also
be said to enter into it. The paraphrase which has just been given of it
goes beyond the actual words of Plato. We have perhaps arrived at the
The Republic |
