| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Main Street by Sinclair Lewis: mud and roofed with hay. In front of it a sagging woman with
tight-drawn hair, and a baby bedraggled, smeary, glorious-
eyed.
"Those are the kind of folks I practise among, good share
of the time. Nels Erdstrom, fine clean young Svenska. He'll
have a corking farm in ten years, but now---- I operated his
wife on a kitchen table, with my driver giving the anesthetic.
Look at that scared baby! Needs some woman with hands
like yours. Waiting for you! Just look at that baby's eyes,
look how he's begging----"
"Don't! They hurt me. Oh, it would be sweet to help
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Memorabilia by Xenophon: tactics and nothing else.
[8] Cf. "Cyrop." I. vi. 12 foll.; VIII. v. 15.
Yet surely (replied Socrates) that is only an infinitisemal part of
generalship. A general[9] must be ready in furnishing the material of
war: in providing the commissariat for his troops; quick in devices,
he must be full of practical resource; nothing must escape his eye or
tax his endurance; he must be shrewd, and ready of wit, a combination
at once of clemency and fierceness, of simplicity and of insidious
craft; he must play the part of watchman, of robber; now prodigal as a
spendthrift, and again close-fisted as a miser, the bounty of his
munificence must be equalled by the narrowness of his greed;
The Memorabilia |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: with a tube of superior flake-white to paint the portrait of the
insufferable sun. No art is true in this sense: none can "compete
with life": not even history, built indeed of indisputable facts,
but these facts robbed of their vivacity and sting; so that even
when we read of the sack of a city or the fall of an empire, we are
surprised, and justly commend the author's talent, if our pulse be
quickened. And mark, for a last differentia, that this quickening
of the pulse is, in almost every case, purely agreeable; that these
phantom reproductions of experience, even at their most acute,
convey decided pleasure; while experience itself, in the cockpit of
life, can torture and slay.
|
