| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Contrast by Royall Tyler: CHARLOTTE
Why, you look as if you were acquainted.
MANLY
I unintentionally intruded into this lady's presence
this morning, for which she was so good as to promise
me her forgiveness.
CHARLOTTE
Oh! ho! is that the case! Have these two pense-
rosos been together? Were they Henry's eyes that
looked so tenderly? [Aside.] And so you promised to
pardon him? and could you be so good-natured?
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner: the comfort we get. Wicked! Oh, Lord! do we not know it? Is it not the
sense of our own exceeding wickedness that is drying up our young heart,
filling it with sand, making all life a dust-bin for us?
Wicked? We know it! Too vile to live, too vile to die, too vile to creep
over this, God's earth, and move among His believing men. Hell is the one
place for him who hates his master, and there we do not want to go. This
is the comfort we get from the old.
And once again we try to seek for comfort. This time great eyes look at us
wondering, and lovely little lips say:
"If it makes you so unhappy to think of these things, why do you not think
of something else, and forget?"
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: beloved is more affected than the lover at the final consummation of their
love, seems likewise to hint at a psychological truth.
It is difficult to exhaust the meanings of a work like the Phaedrus, which
indicates so much more than it expresses; and is full of inconsistencies
and ambiguities which were not perceived by Plato himself. For example,
when he is speaking of the soul does he mean the human or the divine soul?
and are they both equally self-moving and constructed on the same threefold
principle? We should certainly be disposed to reply that the self-motive
is to be attributed to God only; and on the other hand that the appetitive
and passionate elements have no place in His nature. So we should infer
from the reason of the thing, but there is no indication in Plato's own
|
