| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Death of the Lion by Henry James: equal promptitude of the book itself. This was why I carried it to
Albemarle Street no later than on the morrow. I failed to find her
at home, but she wrote to me and I went again; she wanted so much
to hear more about Neil Paraday. I returned repeatedly, I may
briefly declare, to supply her with this information. She had been
immensely taken, the more she thought of it, with that idea of mine
about the act of homage: it had ended by filling her with a
generous rapture. She positively desired to do something sublime
for him, though indeed I could see that, as this particular flight
was difficult, she appreciated the fact that my visits kept her up.
I had it on my conscience to keep her up: I neglected nothing that
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from An Inland Voyage by Robert Louis Stevenson: intruders; and out of people's wonder sprang a sort of light and
passing intimacy all along our route. There is nothing but tit-
for-tat in this world, though sometimes it be a little difficult to
trace: for the scores are older than we ourselves, and there has
never yet been a settling-day since things were. You get
entertainment pretty much in proportion as you give. As long as we
were a sort of odd wanderers, to be stared at and followed like a
quack doctor or a caravan, we had no want of amusement in return;
but as soon as we sank into commonplace ourselves, all whom we met
were similarly disenchanted. And here is one reason of a dozen,
why the world is dull to dull persons.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Statesman by Plato: the use of terms, the error of supposing that philosophy was to be found in
language, the danger of word-catching, have frequently been discussed by
him in the previous dialogues, but nowhere has the spirit of modern
inductive philosophy been more happily indicated than in the words of the
Statesman:--'If you think more about things, and less about words, you will
be richer in wisdom as you grow older.' A similar spirit is discernible in
the remarkable expressions, 'the long and difficult language of facts;' and
'the interrogation of every nature, in order to obtain the particular
contribution of each to the store of knowledge.' Who has described 'the
feeble intelligence of all things; given by metaphysics better than the
Eleatic Stranger in the words--'The higher ideas can hardly be set forth
Statesman |
