| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Reason Discourse by Rene Descartes: feet and hands as at present, unless it continually sent thither new
blood. We likewise perceive from this, that the true use of respiration is
to bring sufficient fresh air into the lungs, to cause the blood which
flows into them from the right ventricle of the heart, where it has been
rarefied and, as it were, changed into vapors, to become thick, and to
convert it anew into blood, before it flows into the left cavity, without
which process it would be unfit for the nourishment of the fire that is
there. This receives confirmation from the circumstance, that it is
observed of animals destitute of lungs that they have also but one cavity
in the heart, and that in children who cannot use them while in the womb,
there is a hole through which the blood flows from the hollow vein into
Reason Discourse |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: was to insist upon coming too, but she met with no opposition;
Katharine seemed indifferent to her presence. In a few minutes they
were walking along the Strand. They walked so rapidly that Mary was
deluded into the belief that Katharine knew where she was going. She
herself was not attentive. She was glad of the movement along lamp-lit
streets in the open air. She was fingering, painfully and with fear,
yet with strange hope, too, the discovery which she had stumbled upon
unexpectedly that night. She was free once more at the cost of a gift,
the best, perhaps, that she could offer, but she was, thank Heaven, in
love no longer. She was tempted to spend the first instalment of her
freedom in some dissipation; in the pit of the Coliseum, for example,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lysis by Plato: stark mad.
O Hippothales, I said, if you have ever made any verses or songs in honour
of your favourite, I do not want to hear them; but I want to know the
purport of them, that I may be able to judge of your mode of approaching
your fair one.
Ctesippus will be able to tell you, he said; for if, as he avers, the sound
of my words is always dinning in his ears, he must have a very accurate
knowledge and recollection of them.
Yes, indeed, said Ctesippus; I know only too well; and very ridiculous the
tale is: for although he is a lover, and very devotedly in love, he has
nothing particular to talk about to his beloved which a child might not
Lysis |
