| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Father Damien by Robert Louis Stevenson: up to nurse my father when he lay a-dying, would yet absolve me
from the bonds of gratitude. You know enough, doubtless, of the
process of canonisation to be aware that, a hundred years after the
death of Damien, there will appear a man charged with the painful
office of the DEVIL'S ADVOCATE. After that noble brother of mine,
and of all frail clay, shall have lain a century at rest, one shall
accuse, one defend him. The circumstance is unusual that the
devil's advocate should be a volunteer, should be a member of a
sect immediately rival, and should make haste to take upon himself
his ugly office ere the bones are cold; unusual, and of a taste
which I shall leave my readers free to qualify; unusual, and to me
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: a malady of the spine. Her Armand was disproportionately
young and slight, a handsome youth, perplexed in the extreme.
But what did it matter? I believed devoutly in her power
to fascinate him, in her dazzling loveliness. I believed
her young, ardent, reckless, disillusioned, under sentence,
feverish, avid of pleasure. I wanted to cross the footlights
and help the slim-waisted Armand in the frilled shirt to convince
her that there was still loyalty and devotion in the world.
Her sudden illness, when the gaiety was at its height,
her pallor, the handkerchief she crushed against her lips,
the cough she smothered under the laughter while Gaston
My Antonia |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: in the world is the rarest.
HERMOGENES: True.
SOCRATES: And how does the legislator make names? and to what does he
look? Consider this in the light of the previous instances: to what does
the carpenter look in making the shuttle? Does he not look to that which
is naturally fitted to act as a shuttle?
HERMOGENES: Certainly.
SOCRATES: And suppose the shuttle to be broken in making, will he make
another, looking to the broken one? or will he look to the form according
to which he made the other?
HERMOGENES: To the latter, I should imagine.
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