| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Crito by Plato: CRITO: Why do you think so?
SOCRATES: I will tell you. I am to die on the day after the arrival of
the ship?
CRITO: Yes; that is what the authorities say.
SOCRATES: But I do not think that the ship will be here until to-morrow;
this I infer from a vision which I had last night, or rather only just now,
when you fortunately allowed me to sleep.
CRITO: And what was the nature of the vision?
SOCRATES: There appeared to me the likeness of a woman, fair and comely,
clothed in bright raiment, who called to me and said: O Socrates,
'The third day hence to fertile Phthia shalt thou go.' (Homer, Il.)
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Last War: A World Set Free by H. G. Wells: coal mines, and house property, were destroyed. Reduced to
penury, he sought to earn a living. He suffered great hardship,
and was then caught up by the war and had a year of soldiering,
first as an officer in the English infantry and then in the army
of pacification. His book tells all these things so simply and
at the same time so explicitly, that it remains, as it were, an
eye by which future generations may have at least one man's
vision of the years of the Great Change.
And he was, he tells us, a 'Modern State' man 'by instinct' from
the beginning. He breathed in these ideas in the class rooms and
laboratories of the Carnegie Foundation school that rose, a long
The Last War: A World Set Free |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche: because there he meant to embark. For there was a good roadstead there, in
which foreign ships also liked to anchor: those ships took many people
with them, who wished to cross over from the Happy Isles. So when
Zarathustra thus ascended the mountain, he thought on the way of his many
solitary wanderings from youth onwards, and how many mountains and ridges
and summits he had already climbed.
I am a wanderer and mountain-climber, said he to his heart, I love not the
plains, and it seemeth I cannot long sit still.
And whatever may still overtake me as fate and experience--a wandering will
be therein, and a mountain-climbing: in the end one experienceth only
oneself.
Thus Spake Zarathustra |
