| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, etc. by Oscar Wilde: O, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which TRUTH doth give!
Shakespeare invites us to notice how the truth of acting, the truth
of visible presentation on the stage, adds to the wonder of poetry,
giving life to its loveliness, and actual reality to its ideal
form. And yet, in the 67th Sonnet, Shakespeare calls upon Willie
Hughes to abandon the stage with its artificiality, its false mimic
life of painted face and unreal costume, its immoral influences and
suggestions, its remoteness from the true world of noble action and
sincere utterance.
Ah, wherefore with infection should he live
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Door in the Wall, et. al. by H. G. Wells: war, these reckless challenges, these wild aggressions--'
"I stood up.
"'No,' I cried. 'I won't hear you. I took count of all those
things, I weighed them--and I have come away.'
"He seemed to consider the possibility of persistence. He
looked from me to where the lady sat regarding us.
"'War,' he said, as if he were speaking to himself, and then
turned slowly from me and walked away.
"I stood, caught in the whirl of thoughts his appeal had set
going.
"I heard my lady's voice.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Eryxias by Platonic Imitator: I dare say, Eryxias, I said, that you may regard these arguments of ours as
a kind of game; you think that they have no relation to facts, but are like
the pieces in the game of draughts which the player can move in such a way
that his opponents are unable to make any countermove. (Compare Republic.)
And perhaps, too, as regards riches you are of opinion that while facts
remain the same, there are arguments, no matter whether true or false,
which enable the user of them to prove that the wisest and the richest are
one and the same, although he is in the wrong and his opponents are in the
right. There would be nothing strange in this; it would be as if two
persons were to dispute about letters, one declaring that the word Socrates
began with an S, the other that it began with an A, and the latter could
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