| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: phuetai], nascitur, grows, by an organic life, and therefore decays
again; which has a beginning, and therefore, I presume, an end. And
Metaphysical means that which we learn to think of after we think of
nature; that which is supernatural, in fact, having neither beginning
nor end, imperishable, immovable, and eternal, which does not become,
but always is. These, at least, are the wisest definitions of these two
terms for us just now; for they are those which were received by the
whole Alexandrian school, even by those commentators who say that
Aristotle, the inventor of the term Metaphysics, named his treatise so
only on account of its following in philosophic sequence his book on
Physics.
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson: his way to a certain restaurant where music was performed,
flutes (as it were of Paradise) accompanied his meal. The
strings went to the melody of that parting smile; they
paraphrased and glossed it in the sense that he desired; and
for the first time in his plain and somewhat dreary life, he
perceived himself to have a taste for music.
The next day, and the next, his meditations moved to that
delectable air. Now he saw her, and was favoured; now saw
her not at all; now saw her and was put by. The fall of her
foot upon the stair entranced him; the books that he sought
out and read were books on Cuba, and spoke of her indirectly;
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Unconscious Comedians by Honore de Balzac: in that employment she is unfitted for any other. She has been
rejected at the minor theatres where they want danseuses; she has not
succeeded in the three towns where ballets are given; she has not had
the money, or perhaps the desire to go to foreign countries--for
perhaps you don't know that the great school of dancing in Paris
supplies the whole world with male and female dancers. Thus a rat who
becomes a marcheuse,--that is to say, an ordinary figurante in a
ballet,--must have some solid attachment which keeps her in Paris:
either a rich man she does not love or a poor man she loves too well.
The one you have just seen pass will probably dress and redress three
times this evening,--as a princess, a peasant-girl, a Tyrolese; by
|
