| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: the king.--They do, Sire, replied the minister, and have the highest sense
of the honour your majesty has done them--but the republick, as godmother,
claims her right, in this case, of naming the child.
In all reason, quoth the king--she will christen him Francis, or Henry, or
Lewis, or some name that she knows will be agreeable to us. Your majesty
is deceived, replied the minister--I have this hour received a dispatch
from our resident, with the determination of the republic on that point
also.--And what name has the republick fixed upon for the Dauphin?--
Shadrach, Mesech, Abed-nego, replied the minister.--By Saint Peter's
girdle, I will have nothing to do with the Swiss, cried Francis the First,
pulling up his breeches and walking hastily across the floor.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad: of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees
were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest.
The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy
in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway
ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery
sand-banks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side.
The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands;
you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted
all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you
thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you
had known once--somewhere--far away--in another existence perhaps.
Heart of Darkness |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: uncritical philosophy after all. 'The proper study of mankind is man;' and
he is a far more complex and wonderful being than the serpent Typho.
Socrates as yet does not know himself; and why should he care to know about
unearthly monsters? Engaged in such conversation, they arrive at the
plane-tree; when they have found a convenient resting-place, Phaedrus pulls
out the speech and reads:--
The speech consists of a foolish paradox which is to the effect that the
non-lover ought to be accepted rather than the lover--because he is more
rational, more agreeable, more enduring, less suspicious, less hurtful,
less boastful, less engrossing, and because there are more of them, and for
a great many other reasons which are equally unmeaning. Phaedrus is
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