| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Gorgias by Plato: and speculation are perfectly harmonized; for there is no necessary
opposition between them. But experience shows that they are commonly
divorced--the ordinary politician is the interpreter or executor of the
thoughts of others, and hardly ever brings to the birth a new political
conception. One or two only in modern times, like the Italian statesman
Cavour, have created the world in which they moved. The philosopher is
naturally unfitted for political life; his great ideas are not understood
by the many; he is a thousand miles away from the questions of the day.
Yet perhaps the lives of thinkers, as they are stiller and deeper, are also
happier than the lives of those who are more in the public eye. They have
the promise of the future, though they are regarded as dreamers and
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin: very earliest physical symptom is trembling at the corners of the mouth
and at the outer corners of the eyes. This is a well-recognized fact.
Constant tremulous agitation of the inferior palpebral and great zygomatic
muscles is pathognomic of the earlier stages of general paralysis.
The countenance has a pleased and benevolent expression. As the disease
advances other muscles become involved, but until complete fatuity is reached,
the prevailing expression is that of feeble benevolence."
As in laughing and broadly smiling the cheeks and upper lip are much raised,
the nose appears to be shortened, and the skin on the bridge becomes
finely wrinkled in transverse lines, with other oblique longitudinal
lines on the sides. The upper front teeth are commonly exposed.
Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Death of the Lion by Henry James: life; he had taken rank at a bound, waked up a national glory. A
national glory was needed, and it was an immense convenience he was
there. What all this meant rolled over me, and I fear I grew a
little faint - it meant so much more than I could say "yea" to on
the spot. In a flash, somehow, all was different; the tremendous
wave I speak of had swept something away. It had knocked down, I
suppose, my little customary altar, my twinkling tapers and my
flowers, and had reared itself into the likeness of a temple vast
and bare. When Neil Paraday should come out of the house he would
come out a contemporary. That was what had happened: the poor man
was to be squeezed into his horrible age. I felt as if he had been
|
