| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Hiero by Xenophon: than the private person, does for that reason derive greater pleasure
from them, this is not so either, Simonides, but it is with tyrants as
with athletes. Just as the athlete feels no glow of satisfaction in
asserting his superiority over amateurs,[12] but annoyance rather when
he sustains defeat at the hands of any real antagonist; so, too, the
tyrant finds little consolation in the fact[13] that he is evidently
richer than the private citizen. What he feels is pain, when he
reflects that he has less himself than other monarchs. These he holds
to be his true antagonists; these are his rivals in the race for
wealth.
[12] Or, "It gives no pleasure to the athlete to win victories over
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot: Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only 370
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
A woman drew her long black hair out tight
The Waste Land |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Life of the Spider by J. Henri Fabre: thing that occurred to her was this hoarding which combines the
hardness of flint with the softness of muslin.
This means of defence seems to be pretty frequent among Spiders.
Our own big House Spider, Tegenaria domestica, encloses her eggs in
a globule strengthened with a rind of silk and of crumbly wreckage
from the mortar of the walls. Other species, living in the open
under stones, work in the same way. They wrap their eggs in a
mineral shell held together with silk. The same fears have
inspired the same protective methods.
Then how comes it that, of the five mothers reared in my cages, not
one has had recourse to the clay rampart? After all, sand
The Life of the Spider |
