| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Statesman by Plato: which make the things themselves are causal.
YOUNG SOCRATES: A very reasonable distinction.
STRANGER: Thus the arts which make spindles, combs, and other instruments
of the production of clothes, may be called co-operative, and those which
treat and fabricate the things themselves, causal.
YOUNG SOCRATES: Very true.
STRANGER: The arts of washing and mending, and the other preparatory arts
which belong to the causal class, and form a division of the great art of
adornment, may be all comprehended under what we call the fuller's art.
YOUNG SOCRATES: Very good.
STRANGER: Carding and spinning threads and all the parts of the process
Statesman |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Fanny Herself by Edna Ferber: mother as her mother, in the way a fourteen-year-old girl
does. It never occurred to her that this mother person, who
was so capable, so confident, so worldly-wise, had once been
a very young bride, with her life before her, and her hopes
stepping high, and her love keeping time with her hopes.
Fanny heard, fascinated, the story of this girl who had
married against the advice of her family and her friends.
Molly Brandeis talked curtly and briefly, and her very
brevity and lack of embroidering details made the story
stand out with stark realism. It was such a story of
courage, and pride, and indomitable will, and sheer pluck as
Fanny Herself |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: intellectual, and the priority of mind, which run through all of them; but
he has no definite forms of words in which he consistently expresses
himself. While the determinations of human thought are in process of
creation he is necessarily tentative and uncertain. And there is least of
definiteness, whenever either in describing the beginning or the end of the
world, he has recourse to myths. These are not the fixed modes in which
spiritual truths are revealed to him, but the efforts of imagination, by
which at different times and in various manners he seeks to embody his
conceptions. The clouds of mythology are still resting upon him, and he
has not yet pierced 'to the heaven of the fixed stars' which is beyond
them. It is safer then to admit the inconsistencies of the Timaeus, or to
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