| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: are not easily severed from the sensual desires, or may even be regarded as
a spiritualized form of them. We may observe that Socrates himself is not
represented as originally unimpassioned, but as one who has overcome his
passions; the secret of his power over others partly lies in his passionate
but self-controlled nature. In the Phaedrus and Symposium love is not
merely the feeling usually so called, but the mystical contemplation of the
beautiful and the good. The same passion which may wallow in the mire is
capable of rising to the loftiest heights--of penetrating the inmost secret
of philosophy. The highest love is the love not of a person, but of the
highest and purest abstraction. This abstraction is the far-off heaven on
which the eye of the mind is fixed in fond amazement. The unity of truth,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Soul of a Bishop by H. G. Wells: become diaphanous and betrayed vast and uncontrollable realities
beyond it, but his daughter had as it were suddenly opened a door
in this glassy sphere of insecurity that had been his abiding
refuge, a door upon the stormy rebel outer world, and she stood
there, young, ignorant, confident, adventurous, ready to step
out.
"Could it be possible that she did not believe?"
He saw her very vividly as he had seen her in the dining-room,
slender and upright, half child, half woman, so fragile and so
fearless. And the door she opened thus carelessly gave upon a
stormy background like one of the stormy backgrounds that were
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte: restrain my tears: but I have restrained them, till my little
tormentors were gone to dessert, or cleared off to bed (my only
prospects of deliverance), and then, in all the bliss of solitude,
I have given myself up to the luxury of an unrestricted burst of
weeping. But this was a weakness I did not often indulge: my
employments were too numerous, my leisure moments too precious, to
admit of much time being given to fruitless lamentations.
I particularly remember one wild, snowy afternoon, soon after my
return in January: the children had all come up from dinner,
loudly declaring that they meant 'to be naughty;' and they had well
kept their resolution, though I had talked myself hoarse, and
Agnes Grey |
