| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Alcibiades II by Platonic Imitator: SOCRATES: But perhaps, my good friend, some one who is wiser than either
you or I will say that we have no right to blame ignorance thus rashly,
unless we can add what ignorance we mean and of what, and also to whom and
how it is respectively a good or an evil?
ALCIBIADES: How do you mean? Can ignorance possibly be better than
knowledge for any person in any conceivable case?
SOCRATES: So I believe:--you do not think so?
ALCIBIADES: Certainly not.
SOCRATES: And yet surely I may not suppose that you would ever wish to act
towards your mother as they say that Orestes and Alcmeon and others have
done towards their parent.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Lily of the Valley by Honore de Balzac: slowly returned up the terraces. She took my arm and leaned upon it
resignedly, bleeding still, but with a bandage on her wound.
"Human life is thus," she said. "What had Monsieur de Mortsauf done to
deserve his fate? It proves the existence of a better world. Alas, for
those who walk in happier ways!"
She went on, estimating life so truly, considering its diverse aspects
so profoundly that these cold judgments revealed to me the disgust
that had come upon her for all things here below. When we reached the
portico she dropped my arm and said these last words: "If God has
given us the sentiment and the desire for happiness ought he not to
take charge himself of innocent souls who have found sorrow only in
The Lily of the Valley |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: something which has no qualities is really a negation. Moreover in the
Hebrew Scriptures the creation of the world is described, even more
explicitly than in the Timaeus, not as a single act, but as a work or
process which occupied six days. There is a chaos in both, and it would be
untrue to say that the Greek, any more than the Hebrew, had any definite
belief in the eternal existence of matter. The beginning of things
vanished into the distance. The real creation began, not with matter, but
with ideas. According to Plato in the Timaeus, God took of the same and
the other, of the divided and undivided, of the finite and infinite, and
made essence, and out of the three combined created the soul of the world.
To the soul he added a body formed out of the four elements. The general
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