| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Alcibiades I by Plato: ALCIBIADES: I think that they can; at any rate, they can teach many far
better things than to play at draughts.
SOCRATES: What things?
ALCIBIADES: Why, for example, I learned to speak Greek of them, and I
cannot say who was my teacher, or to whom I am to attribute my knowledge of
Greek, if not to those good-for-nothing teachers, as you call them.
SOCRATES: Why, yes, my friend; and the many are good enough teachers of
Greek, and some of their instructions in that line may be justly praised.
ALCIBIADES: Why is that?
SOCRATES: Why, because they have the qualities which good teachers ought
to have.
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass: difference whether the slaveholder worships the God of the
Christians, or is a follower of Mahomet, he is the minister of
the same cruelty, and the author of the same misery. _Slavery_
is always _slavery;_ always the same foul, haggard, and damning
scourge, whether found in the eastern or in the western
hemisphere.
There is a still deeper shade to be given to this picture. The
physical cruelties are indeed sufficiently harassing and
revolting; but they are as a few grains of sand on the sea shore,
or a few drops of water in the great ocean, compared with the
stupendous wrongs which it inflicts upon the mental, moral, and
My Bondage and My Freedom |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: twenty minutes' talk, although how they had come to these conclusions
they could not have said.
However they were come by, they were sufficiently serious to send
Mrs. Ambrose a day or two later in search of her brother-in-law. She
found him sitting in his room working, applying a stout blue pencil
authoritatively to bundles of filmy paper. Papers lay to left and
to right of him, there were great envelopes so gorged with papers
that they spilt papers on to the table. Above him hung a photograph
of a woman's head. The need of sitting absolutely still before
a Cockney photographer had given her lips a queer little pucker,
and her eyes for the same reason looked as though she thought
|
