| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Enoch Arden, &c. by Alfred Tennyson: And you shall say that having spoken with me,
And after look'd into yourself, you find
That you meant nothing--as indeed you know
That you meant nothing. Such as match as this!
Impossible, prodigious!' These were words,
As meted by his measure of himself,
Arguing boundless forbearance: after which,
And Leolin's horror-stricken answer, `I
So foul a traitor to myself and her,
Never oh never,' for about as long
As the wind-hover hangs in the balance, paused
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: whether they are true or not.
There you are in the right, Socrates, he replied.
To be sure, I said; yet I doubt whether we shall ever be able to discover
their truth or falsehood; for they are a kind of riddle.
What makes you think so? he said.
Because, I said, he who uttered them seems to me to have meant one thing,
and said another. Is the scribe, for example, to be regarded as doing
nothing when he reads or writes?
I should rather think that he was doing something.
And does the scribe write or read, or teach you boys to write or read, your
own names only, or did you write your enemies' names as well as your own
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the
very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to
the ground -- and to one another; it is either winged or it is
legged. It is hardly as if you had seen a wild creature when a
rabbit or a partridge bursts away, only a natural one, as much to be
expected as rustling leaves. The partridge and the rabbit are still
sure to thrive, like true natives of the soil, whatever revolutions
occur. If the forest is cut off, the sprouts and bushes which
spring up afford them concealment, and they become more numerous
than ever. That must be a poor country indeed that does not support
a hare. Our woods teem with them both, and around every swamp may
Walden |
