| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Myths and Myth-Makers by John Fiske: the workings of the untrained intelligence the world over. In
our first paper we saw how the moon-spots have been variously
explained by Indo-Europeans, as a man with a thorn-bush or as
two children bearing a bucket of water on a pole. In Ceylon it
is said that as Sakyamuni was one day wandering half starved
in the forest, a pious hare met him, and offered itself to him
to be slain and cooked for dinner; whereupon the holy Buddha
set it on high in the moon, that future generations of men
might see it and marvel at its piety. In the Samoan Islands
these dark patches are supposed to be portions of a woman's
figure. A certain woman was once hammering something with a
Myths and Myth-Makers |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Paradise Lost by John Milton: From where I first drew air, and first beheld
This happy light; when, answer none returned,
On a green shady bank, profuse of flowers,
Pensive I sat me down: There gentle sleep
First found me, and with soft oppression seised
My droused sense, untroubled, though I thought
I then was passing to my former state
Insensible, and forthwith to dissolve:
When suddenly stood at my head a dream,
Whose inward apparition gently moved
My fancy to believe I yet had being,
Paradise Lost |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Glasses by Henry James: giggling, nudging spectators, Flora wasn't ready to tell about
herself. She held her little court in the crowd, upon the grass,
playing her light over Jews and Gentiles, completely at ease in all
promiscuities. It was an effect of these things that from the very
first, with every one listening, I could mention that my main
business with her would be just to have a go at her head and to
arrange in that view for an early sitting. It would have been as
impossible, I think, to be impertinent to her as it would have been
to throw a stone at a plate-glass window; so any talk that went
forward on the basis of her loveliness was the most natural thing
in the world and immediately became the most general and sociable.
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