| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Peter Pan by James M. Barrie: found themselves alone in the darkness. John was treading the
air mechanically, and Michael without knowing how to float was
floating.
"Are you shot?" John whispered tremulously.
"I haven't tried [myself out] yet," Michael whispered back.
We know now that no one had been hit. Peter, however, had been
carried by the wind of the shot far out to sea, while Wendy was
blown upwards with no companion but Tinker Bell.
It would have been well for Wendy if at that moment she had
dropped the hat.
I don't know whether the idea came suddenly to Tink, or whether
Peter Pan |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Lone Star Ranger by Zane Grey: outlaw, an outcast, dead to the good and decent world. I am
alone--alone. Better be a callous brute or better dead! I shall
go mad thinking! Man, what is left to you? A hiding-place like
a wolf's--lonely silent days, lonely nights with phantoms! Or
the trail and the road with their bloody tracks, and then the
hard ride, the sleepless, hungry ride to some hole in rocks or
brakes. What hellish thing drives me? Why can't I end it all?
What is left? Only that damned unquenchable spirit of the
gun-fighter to live--to hang on to miserable life--to have no
fear of death, yet to cling like a leach--to die as
gun-fighters seldom die, with boots off! Bain, you were first,
The Lone Star Ranger |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: reminiscence both of the omoiomere, or similar particles of Anaxagoras, and
of the world-animal of the Timaeus.
In Bacon and Locke we have another development in which the mind of man is
supposed to receive knowledge by a new method and to work by observation
and experience. But we may remark that it is the idea of experience,
rather than experience itself, with which the mind is filled. It is a
symbol of knowledge rather than the reality which is vouchsafed to us. The
Organon of Bacon is not much nearer to actual facts than the Organon of
Aristotle or the Platonic idea of good. Many of the old rags and ribbons
which defaced the garment of philosophy have been stripped off, but some of
them still adhere. A crude conception of the ideas of Plato survives in
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