| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton: wife's cousin was married under the French law. It's to
be presumed she knew what that meant."
"Even if she did, what happened subsequently--."
But Archer paused. Mr. Letterblair had laid his pen-
handle against his big corrugated nose, and was looking
down it with the expression assumed by virtuous
elderly gentlemen when they wish their youngers to
understand that virtue is not synonymous with ignorance.
"My dear sir, I've no wish to extenuate the Count's
transgressions; but--but on the other side . . . I wouldn't
put my hand in the fire . . . well, that there hadn't been
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from An Episode Under the Terror by Honore de Balzac: hesitate. She could see him dimly now, under the street lamp that sent
a faint, flickering light through the fog. Fear gave her eyes. She
saw, or thought she saw, something sinister about the stranger's
features. Her old terrors awoke; she took advantage of a kind of
hesitation on his part, slipped through the shadows to the door of the
solitary house, pressed a spring, and vanished swiftly as a phantom.
For awhile the stranger stood motionless, gazing up at the house. It
was in some sort a type of the wretched dwellings in the suburb; a
tumble-down hovel, built of rough stones, daubed over with a coat of
yellowish stucco, and so riven with great cracks that there seemed to
be danger lest the slightest puff of wind might blow it down. The
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: be comprehended under a single name.
THEAETETUS: What are they, and what is their name?
STRANGER: There is the purification of living bodies in their inward and
in their outward parts, of which the former is duly effected by medicine
and gymnastic, the latter by the not very dignified art of the bath-man;
and there is the purification of inanimate substances--to this the arts of
fulling and of furbishing in general attend in a number of minute
particulars, having a variety of names which are thought ridiculous.
THEAETETUS: Very true.
STRANGER: There can be no doubt that they are thought ridiculous,
Theaetetus; but then the dialectical art never considers whether the
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