| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: have only this dreamlike sense, and we are unable to cast off sleep and
determine the truth about them. For an image, since the reality, after
which it is modelled, does not belong to it, and it exists ever as the
fleeting shadow of some other, must be inferred to be in another (i.e. in
space), grasping existence in some way or other, or it could not be at all.
But true and exact reason, vindicating the nature of true being, maintains
that while two things (i.e. the image and space) are different they cannot
exist one of them in the other and so be one and also two at the same time.
Thus have I concisely given the result of my thoughts; and my verdict is
that being and space and generation, these three, existed in their three
ways before the heaven; and that the nurse of generation, moistened by
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: goes merrily forward. I think it will take more than a merely
human secretary to disinter that character. What! a class that is
to be in want from no fault of its own, and yet greedily eager to
receive from strangers; and to be quite respectable, and at the
same time quite devoid of self-respect; and play the most delicate
part of friendship, and yet never be seen; and wear the form of
man, and yet fly in the face of all the laws of human nature: -
and all this, in the hope of getting a belly-god Burgess through a
needle's eye! O, let him stick, by all means: and let his polity
tumble in the dust; and let his epitaph and all his literature (of
which my own works begin to form no inconsiderable part) be
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Complete Poems of Longfellow by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Such were the tidings of evil that burst on the hearts of the
hearers.
Silent and statue-like stood Priscilla, her face looking backward
Still at the face of the speaker, her arms uplifted in horror;
But John Alden, upstarting, as if the barb of the arrow
Piercing the heart of his friend had struck his own, and had
sundered
Once and for ever the bonds that held him bound as a captive,
Wild with excess of sensation, the awful delight of his freedom,
Mingled with pain and regret, unconscious of what he was doing,
Clasped, almost with a groan, the motionless form of Priscilla,
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