| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Lysis by Plato: dissolved. It would be futile to retain the name when the reality has
ceased to be. That two friends should part company whenever the relation
between them begins to drag may be better for both of them. But then
arises the consideration, how should these friends in youth or friends of
the past regard or be regarded by one another? They are parted, but there
still remain duties mutually owing by them. They will not admit the world
to share in their difference any more than in their friendship; the memory
of an old attachment, like the memory of the dead, has a kind of sacredness
for them on which they will not allow others to intrude. Neither, if they
were ever worthy to bear the name of friends, will either of them entertain
any enmity or dislike of the other who was once so much to him. Neither
Lysis |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Poems by T. S. Eliot: Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year
Came Christ the tiger
In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering Judas,
To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk
Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero
With caressing hands, at Limoges
Who walked all night in the next room;
By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;
By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room
Shifting the candles; Fraulein von Kulp
Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. Vacant shuttles
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Sentimental Journey by Laurence Sterne: before I have been three days in Paris, I shall take care to say or
do something or other for which I shall get clapp'd up into the
Bastile, and that I shall live there a couple of months entirely at
the king of France's expense. - I beg pardon, said Eugenius drily:
really I had forgot that resource.
Now the event I treated gaily came seriously to my door.
Is it folly, or nonchalance, or philosophy, or pertinacity - or
what is it in me, that, after all, when La Fleur had gone down
stairs, and I was quite alone, I could not bring down my mind to
think of it otherwise than I had then spoken of it to Eugenius?
- And as for the Bastile; the terror is in the word. - Make the
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