| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Republic by Plato: themselves and their neighbours in word or deed, as the manner of such is.
Neither should they be trained to imitate the action or speech of men or
women who are mad or bad; for madness, like vice, is to be known but not to
be practised or imitated.
Very true, he replied.
Neither may they imitate smiths or other artificers, or oarsmen, or
boatswains, or the like?
How can they, he said, when they are not allowed to apply their minds to
the callings of any of these?
Nor may they imitate the neighing of horses, the bellowing of bulls, the
murmur of rivers and roll of the ocean, thunder, and all that sort of
The Republic |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas: "Eugenie," she said to herself, "is lost, and so are we. The
affair, as it will be reported, will cover us with shame;
for in a society such as ours satire inflicts a painful and
incurable wound. How fortunate that Eugenie is possessed of
that strange character which has so often made me tremble!"
And her glance was turned towards heaven, where a mysterious
providence disposes all things, and out of a fault, nay,
even a vice, sometimes produces a blessing. And then her
thoughts, cleaving through space like a bird in the air,
rested on Cavalcanti. This Andrea was a wretch, a robber, an
assassin, and yet his manners showed the effects of a sort
The Count of Monte Cristo |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Twelve Stories and a Dream by H. G. Wells: of having a Hindu great-grandmother, but, for all that, I don't want
casual strangers to see through me at a glance to HER. So that
I was set against Pyecraft from the beginning.
But he only talked about me in order to get to himself.
"I expect," he said, "you take no more exercise than I do, and
probably you eat no less." (Like all excessively obese people
he fancied he ate nothing.) "Yet,"--and he smiled an oblique smile--
"we differ."
And then he began to talk about his fatness and his fatness;
all he did for his fatness and all he was going to do for his fatness;
what people had advised him to do for his fatness and what he had
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