| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Songs of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: Your wife, the tender, kind, and gay,
Donned her long gauntlets, caught the spud,
And bathed in vegetable blood;
And the long massacre now at end,
See! where the lazy coils ascend,
See, where the bonfire sputters red
At even, for the innocent dead.
Why prate of peace? when, warriors all,
We clank in harness into hall,
And ever bare upon the board
Lies the necessary sword.
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Statesman by Plato: experience, as the proverb says, that 'the more haste the worse speed.'
And now let us begin again at the art of managing herds. You have probably
heard of the fish-preserves in the Nile and in the ponds of the Great King,
and of the nurseries of geese and cranes in Thessaly. These suggest a new
division into the rearing or management of land-herds and of water-herds:--
I need not say with which the king is concerned. And land-herds may be
divided into walking and flying; and every idiot knows that the political
animal is a pedestrian. At this point we may take a longer or a shorter
road, and as we are already near the end, I see no harm in taking the
longer, which is the way of mesotomy, and accords with the principle which
we were laying down. The tame, walking, herding animal, may be divided
Statesman |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Red Inn by Honore de Balzac: the evening he seemed unable to disguise altogether some secret
apprehension or, possibly, some anxious care. The innkeeper's opinion
has always been that this German merchant was fleeing his country.
Later I heard that his manufactory had been burned by one of those
unfortunate chances so frequent in times of war. In spite of its
anxious expression the man's face showed great kindliness. His
features were handsome; and the whiteness of his stout throat was well
set off by a black cravat, a fact which Wilhelm showed jestingly to
Prosper."
Here Monsieur Taillefer drank another glass of water.]
Prosper courteously proposed that the merchant should share their
|
