| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: humour. How a great original genius like Plato might or might not have
written, what was his conception of humour, or what limits he would have
prescribed to himself, if any, in drawing the picture of the Silenus
Socrates, are problems which no critical instinct can determine.
On the other hand, the dialogue has several Platonic traits, whether
original or imitated may be uncertain. Socrates, when he departs from his
character of a 'know nothing' and delivers a speech, generally pretends
that what he is speaking is not his own composition. Thus in the Cratylus
he is run away with; in the Phaedrus he has heard somebody say something--
is inspired by the genius loci; in the Symposium he derives his wisdom from
Diotima of Mantinea, and the like. But he does not impose on Menexenus by
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Dust by Mr. And Mrs. Haldeman-Julius: seemed quite close had been the moment in which she had agreed so
quickly to change the location of the concrete floor. Now she had
utterly lost him. She could scarcely endure the aloofness with
which he had withdrawn into himself.
"Martin," she said a bit huskily, two evenings later, at supper,
"I've decided that you are right. It is foolish and extravagant
of me to want a second story when there are just the two of us.
It will be better to have all those other things you told me
about."
Martin did not respond; simply continued eating without looking
up. This was a habit of his that nearly drove Rose desperate. In
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy: amid the open, chalk-soiled cornlands, near the middle of an imaginary
triangle which has for its three corners the towns of Aldbrickham
and Wintoncester, and the important military station of Quartershot.
The great western highway from London passes through it, near a point
where the road branches into two, merely to unite again some twenty
miles further westward. Out of this bifurcation and reunion there
used to arise among wheeled travellers, before railway days,
endless questions of choice between the respective ways.
But the question is now as dead as the scot-and-lot freeholder,
the road waggoner, and the mail coachman who disputed it;
and probably not a single inhabitant of Stoke-Barehills is now even
Jude the Obscure |
