| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Parmenides by Plato: limited by the human faculties. We cannot by any effort of thought or
exertion of faith be in and out of our own minds at the same instant. How
can we conceive Him under the forms of time and space, who is out of time
and space? How get rid of such forms and see Him as He is? How can we
imagine His relation to the world or to ourselves? Innumerable
contradictions follow from either of the two alternatives, that God is or
that He is not. Yet we are far from saying that we know nothing of Him,
because all that we know is subject to the conditions of human thought. To
the old belief in Him we return, but with corrections. He is a person, but
not like ourselves; a mind, but not a human mind; a cause, but not a
material cause, nor yet a maker or artificer. The words which we use are
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Within the Tides by Joseph Conrad: his flesh had been wet plaster stiffening slowly about his ribs.
Presently, he thought, the two witches will be coming in, with
crutch and stick - horrible, grotesque, monstrous - affiliated to
the devil - to put a mark on his forehead, the tiny little bruise
of death. And he wouldn't be able to do anything. Tom had struck
out at something, but he was not like Tom. His limbs were dead
already. He sat still, dying the death over and over again; and
the only part of him which moved were his eyes, turning round and
round in their sockets, running over the walls, the floor, the
ceiling, again and again till suddenly they became motionless and
stony-starting out of his head fixed in the direction of the bed.
Within the Tides |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Unconscious Comedians by Honore de Balzac: you that a hair-dresser,--I don't say a good hair-dresser, for a man
is, or he is not, a hair-dresser,--a hair-dresser, I repeat, is more
difficult to find than--what shall I say? than--I don't know what--a
minister?--(Sit still!) No, for you can't judge by ministers, the
streets are full of them. A Paganini? No, he's not great enough. A
hair-dresser, monsieur, a man who divines your soul and your habits,
in order to dress your hair conformably with your being, that man has
all that constitutes a philosopher--and such he is. See the women!
Women appreciate us; they know our value; our value to them is the
conquest they make when they have placed their heads in our hands to
attain a triumph. I say to you that a hair-dresser--the world does not
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