| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Bucolics by Virgil: And equal knots, Menalcas, fashioned fair!
ECLOGUE VI
TO VARUS
First my Thalia stooped in sportive mood
To Syracusan strains, nor blushed within
The woods to house her. When I sought to tell
Of battles and of kings, the Cynthian god
Plucked at mine ear and warned me: "Tityrus,
Beseems a shepherd-wight to feed fat sheep,
But sing a slender song." Now, Varus, I-
For lack there will not who would laud thy deeds,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Memorabilia by Xenophon: exordium to his parliamentary speeches which, in his anxiety not to be
thought to have learnt anything from anybody, he has ready for the
occasion.[9] Clearly at the outset he will deliver himself thus: "Men
of Athens, I have never at any time learnt anything from anybody; nor,
if I have ever heard of any one as being an able statesman, well
versed in speech and capable of action, have I sought to come across
him individually. I have not so much as been at pains to provide
muself with a teacher from amongst those who have knowledge;[10] on
the contrary, I have persistently avoided, I will not say learning
from others, but the very faintest suspicion of so doing. However,
anything that occurs to me by the light of nature I shall be glad to
The Memorabilia |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Amy Foster by Joseph Conrad: to whom their strangeness was an object of suspi-
cion, dislike or fear. We read about these things,
and they are very pitiful. It is indeed hard upon
a man to find himself a lost stranger, helpless,
incomprehensible, and of a mysterious origin, in
some obscure corner of the earth. Yet amongst all
the adventurers shipwrecked in all the wild parts of
the world there is not one, it seems to me, that ever
had to suffer a fate so simply tragic as the man I
am speaking of, the most innocent of adventurers
cast out by the sea in the bight of this bay, almost
Amy Foster |
