| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Figure in the Carpet by Henry James: it?"
"Oh," he almost passionately sighed, "if I were only, pen in hand,
one of YOU chaps!"
"That would be a great chance for you of course. But why should
you despise us chaps for not doing what you can't do yourself?"
"Can't do?" He opened his eyes. "Haven't I done it in twenty
volumes? I do it in my way," he continued. "Go YOU and don't do
it in yours."
"Ours is so devilish difficult," I weakly observed.
"So's mine. We each choose our own. There's no compulsion. You
won't come down and smoke?"
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Heroes by Charles Kingsley: fought a long while up and down the land, till the quarrel
was settled, and Acrisius took Argos and one half the land,
and Proetus took Tiryns and the other half. And Proetus and
his Cyclopes built around Tiryns great walls of unhewn stone,
which are standing to this day.
But there came a prophet to that hard-hearted Acrisius and
prophesied against him, and said, 'Because you have risen up
against your own blood, your own blood shall rise up against
you; because you have sinned against your kindred, by your
kindred you shall be punished. Your daughter Danae shall
bear a son, and by that son's hands you shall die. So the
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbot: possibly measure it.' What would you say to such a visitor?
Would not you have him locked up? Well, that is my fate:
and it is as natural for us Flatlanders to lock up a Square
for preaching the Third Dimension, as it is for you Spacelanders
to lock up a Cube for preaching the Fourth. Alas, how strong
a family likeness runs through blind and persecuting humanity
in all Dimensions! Points, Lines, Squares, Cubes, Extra-Cubes --
we are all liable to the same errors, all alike the Slaves
of our respective Dimensional prejudices, as one of your
Spaceland poets has said --
'One touch of Nature makes all worlds akin'."
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions |
