| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Statesman by Plato: portion of the art of composition, and, dismissing the elements of division
which we found there, make two halves, one on the principle of composition,
and the other on the principle of division.
YOUNG SOCRATES: Let that be done.
STRANGER: And once more, Socrates, we must divide the part which belongs
at once both to wool-working and composition, if we are ever to discover
satisfactorily the aforesaid art of weaving.
YOUNG SOCRATES: We must.
STRANGER: Yes, certainly, and let us call one part of the art the art of
twisting threads, the other the art of combining them.
YOUNG SOCRATES: Do I understand you, in speaking of twisting, to be
Statesman |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: steeped in the Bible from childhood like Sir Walter Scott and Ruskin,
a dead language.
Besides, many who have no ear for literature or for music are
accessible to architecture, to pictures, to statues, to dresses, and
to the arts of the stage. Every device of art should be brought to
bear on the young; so that they may discover some form of it that
delights them naturally; for there will come to all of them that
period between dawning adolescence and full maturity when the
pleasures and emotions of art will have to satisfy cravings which, if
starved or insulted, may become morbid and seek disgraceful
satisfactions, and, if prematurely gratified otherwise than
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche: philosophers and friends of knowledge, and beware of martyrdom!
Of suffering "for the truth's sake"! even in your own defense! It
spoils all the innocence and fine neutrality of your conscience;
it makes you headstrong against objections and red rags; it
stupefies, animalizes, and brutalizes, when in the struggle with
danger, slander, suspicion, expulsion, and even worse
consequences of enmity, ye have at last to play your last card as
protectors of truth upon earth--as though "the Truth" were such
an innocent and incompetent creature as to require protectors!
and you of all people, ye knights of the sorrowful countenance,
Messrs Loafers and Cobweb-spinners of the spirit! Finally, ye
Beyond Good and Evil |
