| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Lady Windermere's Fan by Oscar Wilde: imagine why people speak against her. It's those horrid nieces of
mine - the Saville girls - they're always talking scandal. Still,
I should go to Homburg, dear, I really should. She is just a
little too attractive. But where is Agatha? Oh, there she is:
[LADY AGATHA and MR. HOPPER enter from terrace L.U.E.] Mr. Hopper,
I am very, very angry with you. You have taken Agatha out on the
terrace, and she is so delicate.
HOPPER. Awfully sorry, Duchess. We went out for a moment and then
got chatting together.
DUCHESS OF BERWICK. [C.] Ah, about dear Australia, I suppose?
HOPPER. Yes!
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: its bare wood floor and bare whitewashed walls, shines all round you
in a sort of glory of reflected lights. You may doze a while longer
by snatches, or lie awake to study the charcoal men and dogs and
horses with which former occupants have defiled the partitions:
Thiers, with wily profile; local celebrities, pipe in hand; or,
maybe, a romantic landscape splashed in oil. Meanwhile artist after
artist drops into the salle-a-manger for coffee, and then shoulders
easel, sunshade, stool, and paint-box, bound into a fagot, and sets
of for what he calls his 'motive.' And artist after artist, as he
goes out of the village, carries with him a little following of dogs.
For the dogs, who belong only nominally to any special master, hang
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Republic by Plato: of the soul in the Zend Avesta (Haug, Avesta). But no trace of
acquaintance with Zoroaster is found elsewhere in Plato's writings, and
there is no reason for giving him the name of Er the Pamphylian. The
philosophy of Heracleitus cannot be shown to be borrowed from Zoroaster,
and still less the myths of Plato.
The local arrangement of the vision is less distinct than that of the
Phaedrus and Phaedo. Astronomy is mingled with symbolism and mythology;
the great sphere of heaven is represented under the symbol of a cylinder or
box, containing the seven orbits of the planets and the fixed stars; this
is suspended from an axis or spindle which turns on the knees of Necessity;
the revolutions of the seven orbits contained in the cylinder are guided by
The Republic |
