| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: say, neither kindred, nor honour, nor wealth, nor any other motive is able
to implant so well as love. Of what am I speaking? Of the sense of honour
and dishonour, without which neither states nor individuals ever do any
good or great work. And I say that a lover who is detected in doing any
dishonourable act, or submitting through cowardice when any dishonour is
done to him by another, will be more pained at being detected by his
beloved than at being seen by his father, or by his companions, or by any
one else. The beloved too, when he is found in any disgraceful situation,
has the same feeling about his lover. And if there were only some way of
contriving that a state or an army should be made up of lovers and their
loves (compare Rep.), they would be the very best governors of their own
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy: The foreman met Nekhludoff with a smile, and informed him that
the peasants would come to the meeting in the evening. Nekhludoff
thanked him, and went straight into the garden to stroll along
the paths strewn over with the petals of apple-blossom and
overgrown with weeds, and to think over all he had seen.
At first all was quiet, but soon Nekhludoff heard from behind the
foreman's house two angry women's voices interrupting each other,
and now and then the voice of the ever-smiling foreman.
Nekhludoff listened.
"My strength's at an end. What are you about, dragging the very
cross [those baptized in the Russo-Greek Church always wear a
Resurrection |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Kenilworth by Walter Scott: leeches are at a stand, and many of his household suspect foul
practice-witchcraft, or worse."
"What are the symptoms?" said Wayland Smith, stepping forward
hastily.
"Anan?" said the messenger, not comprehending his meaning.
"What does he ail?" said Wayland; "where lies his disease?"
The man looked at Tressilian, as if to know whether he should
answer these inquiries from a stranger, and receiving a sign in
the affirmative, he hastily enumerated gradual loss of strength,
nocturnal perspiration, and loss of appetite, faintness, etc.
"Joined," said Wayland, "to a gnawing pain in the stomach, and a
Kenilworth |
