| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad: tide," he remarked, in a deliberate, careless tone, which
contrasted strongly with his evident readiness to stand there
yarning for an hour or so with an utter stranger.
"Hyperion," I said. "I don't remember ever seeing that ship
anywhere. What sort of a name has she got?"
It appeared from his discursive answer that she had not much of a
name one way or another. She was not very fast. It took no fool,
though, to steer her straight, he believed. Some years ago he had
seen her in Calcutta, and he remembered being told by somebody
then, that on her passage up the river she had carried away both
her hawse-pipes. But that might have been the pilot's fault. Just
The Mirror of the Sea |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: enthusiasm or madness; Socrates is himself 'a prophet new inspired' with
Bacchanalian revelry, which, like his philosophy, he characteristically
pretends to have derived not from himself but from others. The Phaedo also
presents some points of comparison with the Symposium. For there, too,
philosophy might be described as 'dying for love;' and there are not
wanting many touches of humour and fancy, which remind us of the Symposium.
But while the Phaedo and Phaedrus look backwards and forwards to past and
future states of existence, in the Symposium there is no break between this
world and another; and we rise from one to the other by a regular series of
steps or stages, proceeding from the particulars of sense to the universal
of reason, and from one universal to many, which are finally reunited in a
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: of the destruction of the world, simultaneous with the carrying on of
the pettiest intrigues and the performance of court comedies by the
world's saviours, who, in their "laisser aller," recall the Day of
Judgment not so much as the days of the Fronde; the official collective
genius of France brought to shame by the artful stupidity of a single
individual; the collective will of the nation, as often as it speaks
through the general suffrage, seeking its true expression in the
prescriptive enemies of the public interests until it finally finds it
in the arbitrary will of a filibuster. If ever a slice from history is
drawn black upon black, it is this. Men and events appear as reversed
"Schlemihls," [#1 The hero In Chamisso's "Peter Schiemihi," who loses
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