| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: brief poem, from New Orleans. I could not make any of them public,
though sometimes requested to do so. Some of them have given me
great pleasure, and encouraged me to believe I had friends whose
faces I had never seen. If you are pleased with anything a writer
says, and doubt whether to tell him of it, do not hesitate; a
pleasant word is a cordial to one, who perhaps thinks he is tiring
you, and so becomes tired himself. I purr very loud over a good,
honest letter that says pretty things to me.]
- Sometimes very young persons send communications which they want
forwarded to editors; and these young persons do not always seem to
have right conceptions of these same editors, and of the public,
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Call of the Wild by Jack London: a big Colt's revolver and a hunting-knife strapped about him on a
belt that fairly bristled with cartridges. This belt was the most
salient thing about him. It advertised his callowness--a
callowness sheer and unutterable. Both men were manifestly out of
place, and why such as they should adventure the North is part of
the mystery of things that passes understanding.
Buck heard the chaffering, saw the money pass between the man and
the Government agent, and knew that the Scotch half-breed and the
mail-train drivers were passing out of his life on the heels of
Perrault and Francois and the others who had gone before. When
driven with his mates to the new owners' camp, Buck saw a slipshod
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche: displays the noble soul has no aptitude. His egoism hinders him
here: in general, he looks "aloft" unwillingly--he looks either
FORWARD, horizontally and deliberately, or downwards--HE KNOWS
THAT HE IS ON A HEIGHT.
266. "One can only truly esteem him who does not LOOK OUT FOR
himself."--Goethe to Rath Schlosser.
267. The Chinese have a proverb which mothers even teach their
children: "SIAO-SIN" ("MAKE THY HEART SMALL"). This is the
essentially fundamental tendency in latter-day civilizations. I
have no doubt that an ancient Greek, also, would first of all
remark the self-dwarfing in us Europeans of today--in this
Beyond Good and Evil |
