| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Odyssey by Homer: me here, for I want to look after the herdsmen on one of my
farms. In the evening, when I have seen all I want, I will come
down to the city, and to-morrow morning in return for your
trouble I will give you all a good dinner with meat and wine."
{137}
Then Theoclymenus said, 'And what, my dear young friend, is to
become of me? To whose house, among all your chief men, am I to
repair? or shall I go straight to your own house and to your
mother?"
"At any other time," replied Telemachus, "I should have bidden
you go to my own house, for you would find no want of
The Odyssey |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: his friends, Turgénieff, Gay, Leskóf,¹
Zhemtchúzhnikof² and others! He inquired after the
smallest matters; no detail, however trifling in appearance, was
without its interest and importance to him.
¹A novelist, died 1895.
²One of the authors of "Junker Schmidt."
His "Circle of Reading," November 7, the day he died, is
devoted entirely to thoughts on death.
"Life is a dream, death is an awakening," he wrote, while in
expectation of that awakening.
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Republic by Plato: But, said he, let us suppose all this to be included in the charge.
You mean to ask, I said, what will be our answer?
Yes.
If we proceed along the old path, my belief, I said, is that we shall find
the answer. And our answer will be that, even as they are, our guardians
may very likely be the happiest of men; but that our aim in founding the
State was not the disproportionate happiness of any one class, but the
greatest happiness of the whole; we thought that in a State which is
ordered with a view to the good of the whole we should be most likely to
find justice, and in the ill-ordered State injustice: and, having found
them, we might then decide which of the two is the happier. At present, I
The Republic |
