| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll: drowned by a shrill scream from the engine, and everybody jumped
up in alarm, Alice among the rest.
The Horse, who had put his head out of the window, quietly drew
it in and said, `It's only a brook we have to jump over.'
Everybody seemed satisfied with this, though Alice felt a little
nervous at the idea of trains jumping at all. `However, it'll
take us into the Fourth Square, that's some comfort!' she said to
herself. In another moment she felt the carriage rise straight
up into the air, and in her fright she caught at the thing
nearest to her hand. which happened to be the Goat's beard.
* * * * * * *
Through the Looking-Glass |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: to the cultivation of his mind, than which there neither is nor ever will
be anything more honoured in the eyes both of gods and men. Consider this,
fair youth, and know that in the friendship of the lover there is no real
kindness; he has an appetite and wants to feed upon you:
'As wolves love lambs so lovers love their loves.'
But I told you so, I am speaking in verse, and therefore I had better make
an end; enough.
PHAEDRUS: I thought that you were only half-way and were going to make a
similar speech about all the advantages of accepting the non-lover. Why do
you not proceed?
SOCRATES: Does not your simplicity observe that I have got out of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: glad to take refuge in my house, and acknowledged that there was
some virtue in a stove; or sometimes the frozen soil took a piece of
steel out of a plowshare, or a plow got set in the furrow and had to
be cut out.
To speak literally, a hundred Irishmen, with Yankee overseers,
came from Cambridge every day to get out the ice. They divided it
into cakes by methods too well known to require description, and
these, being sledded to the shore, were rapidly hauled off on to an
ice platform, and raised by grappling irons and block and tackle,
worked by horses, on to a stack, as surely as so many barrels of
flour, and there placed evenly side by side, and row upon row, as if
Walden |
