| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Altar of the Dead by Henry James: of Acton Hague, of which he inveterately tried to rid himself. For
Acton Hague no flame could ever rise on any altar of his.
CHAPTER IV.
EVERY year, the day he walked back from the great graveyard, he
went to church as he had done the day his idea was born. It was on
this occasion, as it happened, after a year had passed, that he
began to observe his altar to be haunted by a worshipper at least
as frequent as himself. Others of the faithful, and in the rest of
the church, came and went, appealing sometimes, when they
disappeared, to a vague or to a particular recognition; but this
unfailing presence was always to be observed when he arrived and
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: play cricket; he poked; he shuffled. He was a sarcastic brute, Andrew
said. They knew what he liked best--to be for ever walking up and down,
up and down, with Mr Ramsay, and saying who had won this, who had won
that, who was a "first rate man" at Latin verses, who was "brilliant but I
think fundamentally unsound," who was undoubtedly the "ablest fellow in
Balliol," who had buried his light temporarily at Bristol or Bedford, but
was bound to be heard of later when his Prolegomena, of which Mr Tansley
had the first pages in proof with him if Mr Ramsay would like to see
them, to some branch of mathematics or philosophy saw the light of day.
That was what they talked about.
She could not help laughing herself sometimes. She said, the other day,
To the Lighthouse |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: his philosophy a truly German character by the use of idiomatic German
words. But it may be doubted whether the attempt has been successful.
First because such words as 'in sich seyn,' 'an sich seyn,' 'an und fur
sich seyn,' though the simplest combinations of nouns and verbs, require a
difficult and elaborate explanation. The simplicity of the words contrasts
with the hardness of their meaning. Secondly, the use of technical
phraseology necessarily separates philosophy from general literature; the
student has to learn a new language of uncertain meaning which he with
difficulty remembers. No former philosopher had ever carried the use of
technical terms to the same extent as Hegel. The language of Plato or even
of Aristotle is but slightly removed from that of common life, and was
|
