| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Arizona Nights by Stewart Edward White: souls, had turned our judgment. Anyway, we left a full meal
there in the beanpot.
So without any further delay we set off up the ridge I had
started to cross that morning. Schwartz lagged, sulky as a muley
cow, but we managed to keep him with us. At the top of the ridge
we took our bearings for the next deep bay. Already we had made
up our minds to stick to the sea-coast, both on account of the
lower country over which to travel and the off chance of falling
in with a fishing vessel. Schwartz muttered something about its
being too far even to the next bay, and wanted to sit down on a
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Of The Nature of Things by Lucretius: Tumble from earth to realms of sky below,
No more than these our bodies wing away
Spontaneously to vaults of sky above;
That, when those creatures look upon the sun,
We view the constellations of the night;
And that with us the seasons of the sky
They thus alternately divide, and thus
Do pass the night coequal to our days,
But a vain error has given these dreams to fools,
Which they've embraced with reasoning perverse
For centre none can be where world is still
Of The Nature of Things |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Republic by Plato: shadows? Even so the dialectical faculty withdrawing from sense arrives by
the pure intellect at the contemplation of the idea of good, and never
rests but at the very end of the intellectual world. And the royal road
out of the cave into the light, and the blinking of the eyes at the sun and
turning to contemplate the shadows of reality, not the shadows of an image
only--this progress and gradual acquisition of a new faculty of sight by
the help of the mathematical sciences, is the elevation of the soul to the
contemplation of the highest ideal of being.
'So far, I agree with you. But now, leaving the prelude, let us proceed to
the hymn. What, then, is the nature of dialectic, and what are the paths
which lead thither?' Dear Glaucon, you cannot follow me here. There can
The Republic |
