| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Passion in the Desert by Honore de Balzac: consolation to his heart. His fatigue was so great that he lay down
upon a rock of granite, capriciously cut out like a camp-bed; there he
fell asleep without taking any precaution to defend himself while he
slept. He had made the sacrifice of his life. His last thought was one
of regret. He repented having left the Maugrabins, whose nomadic life
seemed to smile upon him now that he was far from them and without
help. He was awakened by the sun, whose pitiless rays fell with all
their force on the granite and produced an intolerable heat--for he
had had the stupidity to place himself adversely to the shadow thrown
by the verdant majestic heads of the palm trees. He looked at the
solitary trees and shuddered--they reminded him of the graceful shafts
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: know) on one hand--or not enough so, through defect of heat, on the other--
or whether this great Artificer is not so attentive to the little Platonic
exigences of that part of the species, for whose use she is fabricating
this--or that her Ladyship sometimes scarce knows what sort of a husband
will do--I know not: we will discourse about it after supper.
It is enough, that neither the observation itself, or the reasoning upon
it, are at all to the purpose--but rather against it; since with regard to
my uncle Toby's fitness for the marriage state, nothing was ever better:
she had formed him of the best and kindliest clay--had temper'd it with her
own milk, and breathed into it the sweetest spirit--she had made him all
gentle, generous, and humane--she had filled his heart with trust and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Alcibiades I by Plato: intended to rival that great work. If genuine, the proper place of the
Menexenus would be at the end of the Phaedrus. The satirical opening and
the concluding words bear a great resemblance to the earlier dialogues; the
oration itself is professedly a mimetic work, like the speeches in the
Phaedrus, and cannot therefore be tested by a comparison of the other
writings of Plato. The funeral oration of Pericles is expressly mentioned
in the Phaedrus, and this may have suggested the subject, in the same
manner that the Cleitophon appears to be suggested by the slight mention of
Cleitophon and his attachment to Thrasymachus in the Republic; and the
Theages by the mention of Theages in the Apology and Republic; or as the
Second Alcibiades seems to be founded upon the text of Xenophon, Mem. A
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