| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Laches by Plato: As to the art of the general, you yourselves will be my witnesses that he
has an excellent foreknowledge of the future, and that he claims to be the
master and not the servant of the soothsayer, because he knows better what
is happening or is likely to happen in war: and accordingly the law places
the soothsayer under the general, and not the general under the soothsayer.
Am I not correct in saying so, Laches?
LACHES: Quite correct.
SOCRATES: And do you, Nicias, also acknowledge that the same science has
understanding of the same things, whether future, present, or past?
NICIAS: Yes, indeed Socrates; that is my opinion.
SOCRATES: And courage, my friend, is, as you say, a knowledge of the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honore de Balzac: pupil, so complacent to his vices, so fine a calculator of all kinds
of strength, so profound when it was needful to make some human
reckoning, so youthful at table, at Frascati, at--I know not where,
that the grateful Henri de Marsay was hardly moved at aught in 1814,
except when he looked at the portrait of his beloved bishop, the only
personal possession which the prelate had been able to bequeath him
(admirable type of the men whose genius will preserve the Catholic,
Apostolic, and Roman Church, compromised for the moment by the
feebleness of its recruits and the decrepit age of its pontiffs; but
if the church likes!).
The continental war prevented young De Marsay from knowing his real
The Girl with the Golden Eyes |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne: be well to notice that he was now nearly forty, a thin and
stooping figure, in a black coat, out at elbows; notwithstanding
the ill condition of his attire, there were about him several
tokens of a peculiar sort of foppery, unworthy of a mature man,
particularly in the arrangement of his hair which was so disposed
as to give all possible loftiness and breadth to his forehead.
However, he had an intelligent eye, and, on the whole, a marked
countenance.
"A poet!" repeated the young Shaker, a little puzzled how to
understand such a designation, seldom heard in the utilitarian
community where he had spent his life. "Oh, ay, Miriam, he means
The Snow Image |
