| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy: have ordered it!"
Berg and the countess looked at her, perplexed and frightened. The
count stood still at the window and listened.
"Mamma, it's impossible: see what is going on in the yard!" she
cried. "They will be left!..."
"What's the matter with you? Who are 'they'? What do you want?"
"Why, the wounded! It's impossible, Mamma. It's monstrous!... No,
Mamma darling, it's not the thing. Please forgive me, darling....
Mamma, what does it matter what we take away? Only look what is
going on in the yard... Mamma!... It's impossible!"
The count stood by the window and listened without turning round.
War and Peace |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Protagoras by Plato: are always in training, and wear short cloaks; for they imagine that these
are the practices which have enabled the Lacedaemonians to conquer the
other Hellenes. Now when the Lacedaemonians want to unbend and hold free
conversation with their wise men, and are no longer satisfied with mere
secret intercourse, they drive out all these laconizers, and any other
foreigners who may happen to be in their country, and they hold a
philosophical seance unknown to strangers; and they themselves forbid their
young men to go out into other cities--in this they are like the Cretans--
in order that they may not unlearn the lessons which they have taught them.
And in Lacedaemon and Crete not only men but also women have a pride in
their high cultivation. And hereby you may know that I am right in
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: on real difficulties. He interprets past ages by his own. The greatest
classical writers are the least appreciated by him. This seems to be the
reason why so many of them have perished, why the lyric poets have almost
wholly disappeared; why, out of the eighty or ninety tragedies of Aeschylus
and Sophocles, only seven of each had been preserved.
Such an age of sciolism and scholasticism may possibly once more get the
better of the literary world. There are those who prophesy that the signs
of such a day are again appearing among us, and that at the end of the
present century no writer of the first class will be still alive. They
think that the Muse of Literature may transfer herself to other countries
less dried up or worn out than our own. They seem to see the withering
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