| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Pierre Grassou by Honore de Balzac: advanced on turnips, improperly called legs. A true painter would have
turned the little bottle-vendor off at once, assuring him that he
didn't paint vegetables. This painter looked at his client without a
smile, for Monsieur Vervelle wore a three-thousand-franc diamond in
the bosom of his shirt.
Fougeres glanced at Magus and said: "There's fat in it!" using a slang
term then much in vogue in the studios.
Hearing those words Monsieur Vervelle frowned. The worthy bourgeois
drew after him another complication of vegetables in the persons of
his wife and daughter. The wife had a fine veneer of mahogany on her
face, and in figure she resembled a cocoa-nut, surmounted by a head
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: this life, unless he has been taught geometry; for he may be made to do the
same with all geometry and every other branch of knowledge. Now, has any
one ever taught him all this? You must know about him, if, as you say, he
was born and bred in your house.
MENO: And I am certain that no one ever did teach him.
SOCRATES: And yet he has the knowledge?
MENO: The fact, Socrates, is undeniable.
SOCRATES: But if he did not acquire the knowledge in this life, then he
must have had and learned it at some other time?
MENO: Clearly he must.
SOCRATES: Which must have been the time when he was not a man?
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: conciliatory disposition of this evangelist, the supernatural
conception is omitted out of deference to the Gnosticizing
theories of "Colossians" and "Philippians," in which this
materialistic doctrine seems to have had no assignable place. In
"Philippians" especially, many expressions seem to verge upon
Docetism, the extreme form of Gnosticism, according to which the
human body of Jesus was only a phantom. Valentinus, who was
contemporary with the Pauline writers of the second century,
maintained that Jesus was not born of Mary by any process of
conception, but merely passed through her, as light traverses a
translucent substance. And finally Marcion (A. D. 140) carried
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
