| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: We had many fine-weather diversions to beguile the time. There was a
single chess-board and a single pack of cards. Sometimes as many as
twenty of us would be playing dominoes for love. Feats of dexterity,
puzzles for the intelligence, some arithmetical, some of the same
order as the old problem of the fox and goose and cabbage, were
always welcome; and the latter, I observed, more popular as well as
more conspicuously well done than the former. We had a regular daily
competition to guess the vessel's progress; and twelve o'clock, when
the result was published in the wheel-house, came to be a moment of
considerable interest. But the interest was unmixed. Not a bet was
laid upon our guesses. From the Clyde to Sandy Hook I never heard a
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Deputy of Arcis by Honore de Balzac: "So that the woman," continued Vinet, "has no object in proceeding,
for she can't inherit; it belongs to the government to pursue the case
of supposition of person; she can do no more than denounce the fact."
"From which you conclude?" said Rastignac, with that curtness of
speech which to a prolix speaker is a warning to be concise.
"From which I conclude, judicially speaking, that the Romilly peasant-
woman, so far as she is concerned, will have her trouble for her
pains; but, speaking politically, the thing takes quite another
aspect."
"Let us see the political side," said the minister; "up to this point,
I see nothing."
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Crito by Plato: that you may get a dinner. And where will be your fine sentiments about
justice and virtue? Say that you wish to live for the sake of your
children--you want to bring them up and educate them--will you take them
into Thessaly and deprive them of Athenian citizenship? Is this the
benefit which you will confer upon them? Or are you under the impression
that they will be better cared for and educated here if you are still
alive, although absent from them; for your friends will take care of them?
Do you fancy that if you are an inhabitant of Thessaly they will take care
of them, and if you are an inhabitant of the other world that they will not
take care of them? Nay; but if they who call themselves friends are good
for anything, they will--to be sure they will.
|
