| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare: Balk logic with acquaintance that you have,
And practise rhetoric in your common talk;
Music and poesy use to quicken you;
The mathematics and the metaphysics,
Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you:
No profit grows where is no pleasure ta'en;
In brief, sir, study what you most affect.
LUCENTIO.
Gramercies, Tranio, well dost thou advise.
If, Biondello, thou wert come ashore,
We could at once put us in readiness,
The Taming of the Shrew |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs: stake, and finally recalled the strange white figure in whose
arms he had sunk into oblivion.
D'Arnot wondered what fate lay in store for him now. He
could neither see nor hear any signs of life about him.
The incessant hum of the jungle--the rustling of millions
of leaves--the buzz of insects--the voices of the birds and
monkeys seemed blended into a strangely soothing purr, as
though he lay apart, far from the myriad life whose sounds
came to him only as a blurred echo.
At length he fell into a quiet slumber, nor did he awake
again until afternoon.
Tarzan of the Apes |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: and write about poems and paintings, but we seem to have lost the gift of
creating them. Can we wonder that few of them 'come sweetly from nature,'
while ten thousand reviewers (mala murioi) are engaged in dissecting them?
Young men, like Phaedrus, are enamoured of their own literary clique and
have but a feeble sympathy with the master-minds of former ages. They
recognize 'a POETICAL necessity in the writings of their favourite author,
even when he boldly wrote off just what came in his head.' They are
beginning to think that Art is enough, just at the time when Art is about
to disappear from the world. And would not a great painter, such as
Michael Angelo, or a great poet, such as Shakespeare, returning to earth,
'courteously rebuke' us--would he not say that we are putting 'in the place
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