| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Laches by Plato: inversion of the ordinary use of language Laches reclaims, but is in some
degree mollified by a compliment to his own courage. Still, he does not
like to see an Athenian statesman and general descending to sophistries of
this sort. Socrates resumes the argument. Courage has been defined to be
intelligence or knowledge of the terrible; and courage is not all virtue,
but only one of the virtues. The terrible is in the future, and therefore
the knowledge of the terrible is a knowledge of the future. But there can
be no knowledge of future good or evil separated from a knowledge of the
good and evil of the past or present; that is to say, of all good and evil.
Courage, therefore, is the knowledge of good and evil generally. But he
who has the knowledge of good and evil generally, must not only have
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe: scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to
modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful
impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse
to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in
unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down--but with a
shudder even more thrilling than before--upon the remodelled and
inverted images of the grey sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems,
and the vacant and eye-like windows.
Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now proposed to
myself a sojourn of some weeks. Its proprietor, Roderick Usher,
had been one of my boon companions in boyhood; but many years had
The Fall of the House of Usher |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis: and I'll jump for the gin!"
Every one giggled at this naughtiness. In a pleased way Eddie Swanson stated
that he would have a physician analyze his coffee daily. The others were
diverted to a discussion of the more agreeable recent murders, but Babbitt
drew Louetta back to personal things:
"That's the prettiest dress I ever saw in my life."
"Do you honestly like it?"
"Like it? Why, say, I'm going to have Kenneth Escott put a piece in the paper
saying that the swellest dressed woman in the U. S. is Mrs. E. Louetta
Swanson."
"Now, you stop teasing me!" But she beamed. "Let's dance a little. George,
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