| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Sentimental Journey by Laurence Sterne: shop, and pointing the way down the street I was to take, - you
must turn first to your left hand, - MAIS PRENEZ GARDE -there are
two turns; and be so good as to take the second - then go down a
little way and you'll see a church: and, when you are past it, give
yourself the trouble to turn directly to the right, and that will
lead you to the foot of the Pont Neuf, which you must cross - and
there any one will do himself the pleasure to show you. -
She repeated her instructions three times over to me, with the same
goodnatur'd patience the third time as the first; - and if TONES
AND MANNERS have a meaning, which certainly they have, unless to
hearts which shut them out, - she seemed really interested that I
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Memorabilia by Xenophon: maybe there is another considerable advantage in this "fitting"?
Pist. Pray instruct me, Socrates, if you have got an idea.
Soc. A corselet which fits is less galling by its weight than one
which does not fit, for the latter must either drag from the shoulders
with a dead weight or press upon some other part of the body, and so
it becomes troublesome and uncomfortable; but that which fits, having
its weight distributed partly along the collar-bone and shoulder-
blade, partly over the shoulders and chest, and partly the back and
belly, feels like another natural integument rather than an extra load
to carry.[13]
[13] Schneider ad loc. cf Eur. "Electr." 192, {prosthemata aglaias},
The Memorabilia |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: calculate the orbit of his own soul? When the son went out to look
for his father's asses, he did not know that a man of God was
waiting for him with the very chrism of coronation, and that his
own soul was already the soul of a king.
I hope to live long enough and to produce work of such a character
that I shall be able at the end of my days to say, 'Yes! this is
just where the artistic life leads a man!' Two of the most perfect
lives I have come across in my own experience are the lives of
Verlaine and of Prince Kropotkin: both of them men who have passed
years in prison: the first, the one Christian poet since Dante;
the other, a man with a soul of that beautiful white Christ which
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