| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche: order to kiss it; but Zarathustra checked his veneration, and stepped back
frightened, fleeing as it were, silently and suddenly into the far
distance. After a little while, however, he was again at home with his
guests, looked at them with clear scrutinising eyes, and said:
"My guests, ye higher men, I will speak plain language and plainly with
you. It is not for YOU that I have waited here in these mountains."
("'Plain language and plainly?' Good God!" said here the king on the left
to himself; "one seeth he doth not know the good Occidentals, this sage out
of the Orient!
But he meaneth 'blunt language and bluntly'--well! That is not the worst
taste in these days!")
Thus Spake Zarathustra |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Rezanov by Gertrude Atherton: "Mi padre!" she whispered hoarsely, "you will
take my part! You will not condemn me to a life of
misery! I am too proud to speak openly to others
--but I love this man more than my soul--more
than my immortal soul. Do you hear? I am in
danger of mortal sin. Perhaps I am already in that
state. You cannot save me if he goes. I will not
pray. I will not come to the church. I will be an
outcast. If I marry him, I will be a good Catholic
to the end of my days. If I marry him I can think
of other things besides--of my church, my father,
Rezanov |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: the same time the most polite.
Considered a priori, the connection between the two is not far to
seek. Impersonality, by lessening the interest in one's self,
induces one to take an interest in others. Introspection tends to
make of man a solitary animal, the absence of it a social one.
The more impersonal the people, the more will the community supplant
the individual in the popular estimation. The type becomes the
interesting thing to man, as it always is to nature. Then, as the
social desires develop, politeness, being the means to their
enjoyment, develops also.
A second omission in Japanese etymology is that of gender. That
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