| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Glasses by Henry James: herself above all she was fixed for ever, rescued from all change
and ransomed from all doubt. Her old certainties, her old vanities
were justified and sanctified, and in the darkness that had closed
upon her one object remained clear. That object, as unfading as a
mosaic mask, was fortunately the loveliest she could possibly look
upon. The greatest blessing of all was of course that Dawling
thought so. Her future was ruled with the straightest line, and so
for that matter was his. There were two facts to which before I
left my friends I gave time to sink into my spirit. One was that
he had changed by some process as effective as Flora's change, had
been simplified somehow into service as she had been simplified
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: The question of a reading, or a grammatical form, or an accent, or the uses
of a word, took the place of the aim or subject of the book. He had no
sense of the beauties of an author, and very little light is thrown by him
on real difficulties. He interprets past ages by his own. The greatest
classical writers are the least appreciated by him. This seems to be the
reason why so many of them have perished, why the lyric poets have almost
wholly disappeared; why, out of the eighty or ninety tragedies of Aeschylus
and Sophocles, only seven of each had been preserved.
Such an age of sciolism and scholasticism may possibly once more get the
better of the literary world. There are those who prophesy that the signs
of such a day are again appearing among us, and that at the end of the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from La Grenadiere by Honore de Balzac: are left visible, and the intervening spaces filled with a kind of
white plaster.
The first story consists of two large whitewashed bedrooms with stone
chimney-pieces, less elaborately carved than those in the rooms
beneath. Every door and window is on the south side of the house, save
a single door to the north, contrived behind the staircase to give
access to the vineyard. Against the western wall stands a
supplementary timber-framed structure, all the woodwork exposed to the
weather being fledged with slates, so that the walls are checkered
with bluish lines. This shed (for it is little more) is the kitchen of
the establishment. You can pass from it into the house without going
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