| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Laches by Plato: health or disease is the more terrible to a man? Had not many a man better
never get up from a sick bed? I should like to know whether you think that
life is always better than death. May not death often be the better of the
two?
LACHES: Yes certainly so in my opinion.
NICIAS: And do you think that the same things are terrible to those who
had better die, and to those who had better live?
LACHES: Certainly not.
NICIAS: And do you suppose that the physician or any other artist knows
this, or any one indeed, except he who is skilled in the grounds of fear
and hope? And him I call the courageous.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Moby Dick by Herman Melville: any very considerable degree of exactness. So there is no earthly
way of finding out precisely what the whale really looks like. And
the only mode in which you can derive even a tolerable idea of his
living contour, is by going a whaling yourself; but by so doing, you
run no small risk of being eternally stove and sunk by him.
Wherefore, it seems to me you had best not be too fastidious in your
curiosity touching this Leviathan.
CHAPTER 56
Of the Less Erroneous Pictures of Whales, and the True Pictures of
Whaling Scenes.
In connexion with the monstrous pictures of whales, I am strongly
Moby Dick |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from On Horsemanship by Xenophon: than compelling him to calm down. It is the long steady course rather
than the frequent turn which tends to calm a horse.[3] A quiet pace
sustained for a long time has a caressing,[4] soothing effect, the
reverse of exciting. If any one proposes by a series of fast and oft-
repeated gallops to produce a sense of weariness in the horse, and so
to tame him, his expectation will not be justified by the result; for
under such circumstances a spirited horse will do his best to carry
the day by main force,[5] and with a show of temper, like a passionate
man, may contrive to bring on himself and his rider irreparable
mischief.
[3] Or, "long stretches rather than a succession of turns and counter
On Horsemanship |
