| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: woman being the intellectual helpmate or friend of man (except in the rare
instances of a Diotima or an Aspasia), seeing that, even as to personal
beauty, her place was taken by young mankind instead of womankind, he tries
to work out the problem of love without regard to the distinctions of
nature. And full of the evils which he recognized as flowing from the
spurious form of love, he proceeds with a deep meaning, though partly in
joke, to show that the 'non-lover's' love is better than the 'lover's.'
We may raise the same question in another form: Is marriage preferable
with or without love? 'Among ourselves,' as we may say, a little parodying
the words of Pausanias in the Symposium, 'there would be one answer to this
question: the practice and feeling of some foreign countries appears to be
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from New Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson: And the steady breezes blow,
Bearing perfume, bearing love.
Breezes hasten, swallows fly,
Towered clouds forever ply,
And at noonday, you and I
See the same sunshine above.
Dew and rain fall everywhere,
Harvests ripen, flowers are fair,
And the whole round earth is bare
To the moonshine and the sun;
And the live air, fanned with wings,
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tess of the d'Urbervilles, A Pure Woman by Thomas Hardy: that way for a long while, and the faint notes of the
band were the only human sounds audible within the rim
of blue hills.
II
The village of Marlott lay amid the north-eastern
undulations of the beautiful Vale of Blakemore or
Blackmoor aforesaid, and engirdled and secluded region,
for the most part untrodden as yet by tourist or
landscape-painter, though within a four hours' journey
from London.
It is a vale whose acquaintance is best made by viewing
Tess of the d'Urbervilles, A Pure Woman |
