| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: STRANGER: And you are aware that this exchange of the merchant is of two
kinds: it is partly concerned with food for the use of the body, and
partly with the food of the soul which is bartered and received in exchange
for money.
THEAETETUS: What do you mean?
STRANGER: You want to know what is the meaning of food for the soul; the
other kind you surely understand.
THEAETETUS: Yes.
STRANGER: Take music in general and painting and marionette playing and
many other things, which are purchased in one city, and carried away and
sold in another--wares of the soul which are hawked about either for the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Roads of Destiny by O. Henry: broadside upon the ground. As we gathered around it, it walled its
great eyes almost humanly towards Kearny and expired. That was bad;
but worse, to our minds, was the concomitant disaster. Part of the
mule's burden had been one hundred pounds of the finest coffee to be
had in the tropics. The bag burst and spilled the priceless brown mass
of the ground berries among the dense vines and weeds of the swampy
land. /Mala suerte/! When you take away from an Esperandan his coffee,
you abstract his patriotism and 50 per cent. of his value as a
soldier. The men began to rake up the precious stuff; but I beckoned
Kearny back along the trail where they would not hear. The limit had
been reached.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from At the Sign of the Cat & Racket by Honore de Balzac: the qualities they lacked, and either by possessing those qualities,
or by feigning to possess them, they found means of making such a
handsome display of them in their husbands' eyes that in the end they
impressed them. Also, I must tell you, all these souls which appear so
lofty have just a speck of madness in them, which we ought to know how
to take advantage of. By firmly resolving to have the upper hand and
never deviating from that aim, by bringing all our actions to bear on
it, all our ideas, our cajolery, we subjugate these eminently
capricious natures, which, by the very mutability of their thoughts,
lend us the means of influencing them."
"Good heavens!" cried the young wife in dismay. "And this is life. It
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