| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Chita: A Memory of Last Island by Lafcadio Hearn: elders in the books of the Wizards.
III
... Eighteen hundred and sixty-seven;--midsummer in the
pest-smitten city of New Orleans.
Heat motionless and ponderous. The steel-blue of the sky
bleached from the furnace-circle of the horizon;--the lukewarm
river ran yellow and noiseless as a torrent of fluid wax. Even
sounds seemed blunted by the heaviness of the air;--the rumbling
of wheels, the reverberation of footsteps, fell half-toned upon
the ear, like sounds that visit a dozing brain.
Daily, almost at the same hour, the continuous sense of
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: divided them into natural and artificial. The pleasures of sight and sound
might then have been regarded as being the expression of ideas. But this
higher and truer point of view never appears to have occurred to Plato.
Nor has he any distinction between the fine arts and the mechanical; and,
neither here nor anywhere, an adequate conception of the beautiful in
external things.
7. Plato agrees partially with certain 'surly or fastidious' philosophers,
as he terms them, who defined pleasure to be the absence of pain. They are
also described as eminent in physics. There is unfortunately no school of
Greek philosophy known to us which combined these two characteristics.
Antisthenes, who was an enemy of pleasure, was not a physical philosopher;
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: had discovered a way to make it useful; for it had come to be
believed that the Mississippi emptied into the Gulf of California,
and therefore afforded a short cut from Canada to China.
Previously the supposition had been that it emptied into the Atlantic,
or Sea of Virginia.
Chapter 2
The River and Its Explorers
LA SALLE himself sued for certain high privileges, and they
were graciously accorded him by Louis XIV of inflated memory.
Chief among them was the privilege to explore, far and wide,
and build forts, and stake out continents, and hand the same over
|
