| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: circle, to the highest heaven. Thus Swedenborg's doctrine is the
product of a lucid spirit noting down the innumerable signs by which
the angels manifest their presence among men.
This doctrine, which I have endeavored to sum up in a more or less
consistent form, was set before me by Lambert with all the fascination
of mysticism, swathed in the wrappings of the phraseology affected by
mystical writers: an obscure language full of abstractions, and taking
such effect on the brain, that there are books by Jacob Boehm,
Swedenborg, and Madame Guyon, so strangely powerful that they give
rise to phantasies as various as the dreams of the opium-eater.
Lambert told me of mystical facts so extraordinary, he so acted on my
Louis Lambert |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: But in winter the cold and the peril take most of the fun out of it.
A buoy is nothing but a board four or five feet long,
with one end turned up; it is a reversed school-house bench,
with one of the supports left and the other removed.
It is anchored on the shoalest part of the reef by a
rope with a heavy stone made fast to the end of it.
But for the resistance of the turned-up end of the reversed bench,
the current would pull the buoy under water. At night, a paper
lantern with a candle in it is fastened on top of the buoy,
and this can be seen a mile or more, a little glimmering spark in
the waste of blackness.
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Republic by Plato: Yes, he said, human life is certainly concerned with them.
Then if the good and just man be thus superior in pleasure to the evil and
unjust, his superiority will be infinitely greater in propriety of life and
in beauty and virtue?
Immeasurably greater.
Well, I said, and now having arrived at this stage of the argument, we may
revert to the words which brought us hither: Was not some one saying that
injustice was a gain to the perfectly unjust who was reputed to be just?
Yes, that was said.
Now then, having determined the power and quality of justice and injustice,
let us have a little conversation with him.
The Republic |
