| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: wit in others,' and also in order to bring the comic and tragic poet into
juxtaposition, as if by accident. A suitable 'expectation' of Aristophanes
is raised by the ludicrous circumstance of his having the hiccough, which
is appropriately cured by his substitute, the physician Eryximachus. To
Eryximachus Love is the good physician; he sees everything as an
intelligent physicist, and, like many professors of his art in modern
times, attempts to reduce the moral to the physical; or recognises one law
of love which pervades them both. There are loves and strifes of the body
as well as of the mind. Like Hippocrates the Asclepiad, he is a disciple
of Heracleitus, whose conception of the harmony of opposites he explains in
a new way as the harmony after discord; to his common sense, as to that of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from First Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln: and engaged that it should be perpetual, by the Articles of Confederation
in 1778. And, finally, in 1787 one of the declared objects for ordaining
and establishing the Constitution was "TO FORM A MORE PERFECT UNION."
But if the destruction of the Union by one or by a part only of the States
be lawfully possible, the Union is LESS perfect than before the Constitution,
having lost the vital element of perpetuity.
It follows from these views that no State upon its own mere motion
can lawfully get out of the Union; that Resolves and Ordinances
to that effect are legally void; and that acts of violence,
within any State or States, against the authority of the United States,
are insurrectionary or revolutionary, according to circumstances.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Herodias by Gustave Flaubert: and, seeing a lictor step forward armed with a hatchet, he feared that
the man intended to behead Iaokanann. He stayed the hand of the lictor
after the first blow, and then slipped between the heavy lid and the
pavement a kind of hook. He braced his long, lean arms, raised the
cover slowly, and in a moment it lay flat upon the stones. The
bystanders admired the strength of the old man.
Under the bronze lid was a wooden trap-door of the same size. At a
blow of the fist it folded back, allowing a wide hole to be seen, the
mouth of an immense pit, with a flight of winding steps leading down
into the darkness. Those that bent over to peer into the cavern beheld
a vague and terrifying shape in its depths.
Herodias |
