| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from An Inland Voyage by Robert Louis Stevenson: the grown people took it. But we were English, and were soon
running up the hill with the best. Being travellers ourselves in a
small way, we would fain have seen these other travellers alight.
The spectacle was over by the time we gained the top of the hill.
All the gold had withered out of the sky, and the balloon had
disappeared. Whither? I ask myself; caught up into the seventh
heaven? or come safely to land somewhere in that blue uneven
distance, into which the roadway dipped and melted before our eyes?
Probably the aeronauts were already warming themselves at a farm
chimney, for they say it is cold in these unhomely regions of the
air. The night fell swiftly. Roadside trees and disappointed
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: SOCRATES: Well, and is not Eros the son of Aphrodite, and a god?
PHAEDRUS: So men say.
SOCRATES: But that was not acknowledged by Lysias in his speech, nor by
you in that other speech which you by a charm drew from my lips. For if
love be, as he surely is, a divinity, he cannot be evil. Yet this was the
error of both the speeches. There was also a simplicity about them which
was refreshing; having no truth or honesty in them, nevertheless they
pretended to be something, hoping to succeed in deceiving the manikins of
earth and gain celebrity among them. Wherefore I must have a purgation.
And I bethink me of an ancient purgation of mythological error which was
devised, not by Homer, for he never had the wit to discover why he was
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories by Alice Dunbar: neighbourhood where millionaires live before their fortunes are
made and fashionable, high-priced private schools flourish, where
the small cottages are occupied by aspiring school-teachers and
choir-singers. Such was this locality, and you must admit that
it was indeed a condescension to tolerate Tony and Mrs. Murphy.
He was a great, black-bearded, hoarse-voiced, six-foot specimen
of Italian humanity, who looked in his little shop and on the
prosaic pavement of Prytania Street somewhat as Hercules might
seem in a modern drawing-room. You instinctively thought of wild
mountain-passes, and the gleaming dirks of bandit contadini in
looking at him. What his last name was, no one knew. Someone
The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories |
