| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: Yes, he said.
Now then, I said, making an offering of the third or last argument to Zeus
the Saviour, let us begin again, and ask, in the first place, whether it is
or is not possible for a person to know that he knows and does not know
what he knows and does not know; and in the second place, whether, if
perfectly possible, such knowledge is of any use.
That is what we have to consider, he said.
And here, Critias, I said, I hope that you will find a way out of a
difficulty into which I have got myself. Shall I tell you the nature of
the difficulty?
By all means, he replied.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Man in Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart: before I realized that it was not my own!
Mine was of alligator hide. I had killed the beast in Florida, after
the expenditure of enough money to have bought a house and enough
energy to have built one. The bag I held in my hand was a black one,
sealskin, I think. The staggering thought of what the loss of my bag
meant to me put my finger on the bell and kept it there until the
porter came.
"Did you ring, sir?" he asked, poking his head through the curtains
obsequiously. McKnight objects that nobody can poke his head through
a curtain and be obsequious. But Pullman porters can and do.
"No," I snapped. "It rang itself. What in thunder do you mean by
The Man in Lower Ten |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Wife, et al by Anton Chekhov: I am full of hatred, and contempt, and indignation, and loathing,
and dread. I have become excessively severe, exacting, irritable,
ungracious, suspicious. Even things that in old days would have
provoked me only to an unnecessary jest and a good-natured laugh
now arouse an oppressive feeling in me. My reasoning, too, has
undergone a change: in old days I despised money; now I harbour
an evil feeling, not towards money, but towards the rich as
though they were to blame: in old days I hated violence and
tyranny, but now I hate the men who make use of violence, as
though they were alone to blame, and not all of us who do not
know how to educate each other. What is the meaning of it? If
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