| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: further to be wished, imagination would have no incentive to work.
Coleridge's distinction does very well to separate, empirically,
certain kinds of imaginative concepts from certain others; but it
has no real foundation in fact. Nor presumably did he mean it to
have. But it serves, not inaptly, as a text to point out an
important scientific truth, namely, that there are not two such
qualities of the mind, but only one. For otherwise we might have
supposed the fact too evident to need mention. Imagination is the
single source of the new, the one mainspring of psychical advance;
reason, like a balance-wheel, only keeping the action regular.
For reason is but the touchstone of experience, our own, inherited,
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy: druidical stone. I am aware that there are boulevards
in Paris."
Yeobright looked thoughtfully on the ground.
"That means much," he said.
"It does indeed," said Eustacia.
"I remember when I had the same longing for town bustle.
Five years of a great city would be a perfect cure
for that."
"Heaven send me such a cure! Now, Mr. Yeobright,
I will go indoors and plaster my wounded hand."
They separated, and Eustacia vanished in the increasing shade.
Return of the Native |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence: business, money and fame, such as it was...she wanted to go ahead with
it all. Love, sex, all that sort of stuff, just water-ices! Lick it up
and forget it. If you don't hang on to it in your mind, it's nothing.
Sex especially...nothing! Make up your mind to it, and you've solved
the problem. Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had
the same effect, and amounted to about the same thing.
But a child, a baby! That was still one of the sensations. She would
venture very gingerly on that experiment. There was the man to
consider, and it was curious, there wasn't a man in the world whose
children you wanted. Mick's children! Repulsive thought! As lief have a
child to a rabbit! Tommy Dukes? he was very nice, but somehow you
Lady Chatterley's Lover |
