| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Merry Men by Robert Louis Stevenson: sea.' Seals that haunted on that coast have been known to speak to
man in his own tongue, presaging great disasters. It was here that
a certain saint first landed on his voyage out of Ireland to
convert the Hebrideans. And, indeed, I think he had some claim to
be called saint; for, with the boats of that past age, to make so
rough a passage, and land on such a ticklish coast, was surely not
far short of the miraculous. It was to him, or to some of his
monkish underlings who had a cell there, that the islet owes its
holy and beautiful name, the House of God.
Among these old wives' stories there was one which I was inclined
to hear with more credulity. As I was told, in that tempest which
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Bunner Sisters by Edith Wharton: a private dwelling with a brick front, green shutters on weak
hinges, and a dress-maker's sign in the window above the shop. On
each side of its modest three stories stood higher buildings, with
fronts of brown stone, cracked and blistered, cast-iron balconies
and cat-haunted grass-patches behind twisted railings. These
houses too had once been private, but now a cheap lunchroom filled
the basement of one, while the other announced itself, above the
knotty wistaria that clasped its central balcony, as the Mendoza
Family Hotel. It was obvious from the chronic cluster of refuse-
barrels at its area-gate and the blurred surface of its curtainless
windows, that the families frequenting the Mendoza Hotel were not
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: Protagoras answer this argument? For he cannot say that no one deems
another ignorant or mistaken. If you form a judgment, thousands and tens
of thousands are ready to maintain the opposite. The multitude may not and
do not agree in Protagoras' own thesis that 'Man is the measure of all
things;' and then who is to decide? Upon his own showing must not his
'truth' depend on the number of suffrages, and be more or less true in
proportion as he has more or fewer of them? And he must acknowledge
further, that they speak truly who deny him to speak truly, which is a
famous jest. And if he admits that they speak truly who deny him to speak
truly, he must admit that he himself does not speak truly. But his
opponents will refuse to admit this of themselves, and he must allow that
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