| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot: will be found translated in the late Henry Clarke Warren's _Buddhism
in Translation_ (Harvard Oriental Series). Mr. Warren was one
of the great pioneers of Buddhist studies in the Occident.
309. From St. Augustine's CONFESSIONS again. The col-location
of these two representatives of eastern and western asceticism,
as the culmination of this part of the poem, is not an accident.
V. WHAT THE THUNDER SAID
In the first part of Part V three themes are employed:
the journey to Emmaus, the approach to the Chapel Perilous
(see Miss Weston's book), and the present decay of eastern Europe.
357. This is _Turdus aonalaschkae pallasii_, the hermit-thrush
The Waste Land |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: inheritance of Puritanic gloom. They were native Englishmen,
whose fathers had lived in the sunny richness of the Elizabethan
epoch; a time when the life of England, viewed as one great mass,
would appear to have been as stately, magnificent, and joyous, as
the world has ever witnessed. Had they followed their hereditary
taste, the New England settlers would have illustrated all events
of public importance by bonfires, banquets, pageantries, and
processions. Nor would it have been impracticable, in the
observance of majestic ceremonies, to combine mirthful recreation
with solemnity, and give, as it were, a grotesque and brilliant
embroidery to the great robe of state, which a nation, at such
The Scarlet Letter |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: and more; every truth is at first the enemy of every other truth. Yet
without this division there can be no truth; nor any complete truth without
the reunion of the parts into a whole. And hence the coexistence of
opposites in the unity of the idea is regarded by Hegel as the supreme
principle of philosophy; and the law of contradiction, which is affirmed by
logicians to be an ultimate principle of the human mind, is displaced by
another law, which asserts the coexistence of contradictories as imperfect
and divided elements of the truth. Without entering further into the
depths of Hegelianism, we may remark that this and all similar attempts to
reconcile antinomies have their origin in the old Platonic problem of the
'One and Many.'
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