| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Protagoras by Plato: What would you say? Would you not answer in the same way?
Certainly, he said.
And then after this suppose that he came and asked us, 'What were you
saying just now? Perhaps I may not have heard you rightly, but you seemed
to me to be saying that the parts of virtue were not the same as one
another.' I should reply, 'You certainly heard that said, but not, as you
imagine, by me; for I only asked the question; Protagoras gave the answer.'
And suppose that he turned to you and said, 'Is this true, Protagoras? and
do you maintain that one part of virtue is unlike another, and is this your
position?'--how would you answer him?
I could not help acknowledging the truth of what he said, Socrates.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Dracula by Bram Stoker: and there may be consequence to make the brave shudder.
For if we fail in this our fight he must surely win,
and then where end we? Life is nothings, I heed him not.
But to fail here, is not mere life or death. It is that we become
as him, that we henceforward become foul things of the night
like him, without heart or conscience, preying on the bodies
and the souls of those we love best. To us forever are
the gates of heaven shut, for who shall open them to us again?
We go on for all time abhorred by all, a blot on the face of
God's sunshine, an arrow in the side of Him who died for man.
But we are face to face with duty, and in such case must
Dracula |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne: remained that, whether hyperbolically or parabolically borne away,
the projectile would never again meet either the earth or the moon.
What would become of these bold travelers in the immediate future?
If they did not die of hunger, if they did not die of thirst,
in some days, when the gas failed, they would die from want of air,
unless the cold had killed them first. Still, important as it was
to economize the gas, the excessive lowness of the surrounding
temperature obliged them to consume a certain quantity.
Strictly speaking, they could do without its _light_, but not
without its _heat_. Fortunately the caloric generated by Reiset's
and Regnaut's apparatus raised the temperature of the interior
From the Earth to the Moon |
