| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe: across the field; and, flourishing his whip, he came up to her.
"What! what!" he said to the woman, with an air of triumph,
"You a foolin'? Go along! yer under me now,--mind yourself, or
yer'll cotch it!"
A glance like sheet-lightning suddenly flashed from those
black eyes; and, facing about, with quivering lip and dilated
nostrils, she drew herself up, and fixed a glance, blazing with
rage and scorn, on the driver.
"Dog!" she said, "touch _me_, if you dare! I've power enough,
yet, to have you torn by the dogs, burnt alive, cut to inches!
I've only to say the word!"
Uncle Tom's Cabin |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn: Ari no sumai ya!
Go-getsu ame.
[Now the poor creature has nowhere to go!... Alas for the dwellings of the
ants in this rain of the fifth month!]
But those big black ants in my garden do not seem to need any sympathy.
They have weathered the storm in some unimaginable way, while great trees
were being uprooted, and houses blown to fragments, and roads washed out of
existence. Yet, before the typhoon, they took no other visible precaution
than to block up the gates of their subterranean town. And the spectacle of
their triumphant toil to-day impels me to attempt an essay on Ants.
I should have like to preface my disquisitions with something from the old
Kwaidan |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: like, about which you asked, they would not venture either to deny their
existence, or to maintain that they were all corporeal.
STRANGER: Verily, Theaetetus, I perceive a great improvement in them; the
real aborigines, children of the dragon's teeth, would have been deterred
by no shame at all, but would have obstinately asserted that nothing is
which they are not able to squeeze in their hands.
THEAETETUS: That is pretty much their notion.
STRANGER: Let us push the question; for if they will admit that any, even
the smallest particle of being, is incorporeal, it is enough; they must
then say what that nature is which is common to both the corporeal and
incorporeal, and which they have in their mind's eye when they say of both
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