| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Memorabilia by Xenophon: well trodden out at heel by this time, considering the circulation you
have given them.
[23] Cf. Plat. "Gorg." 491 A; "Symp." 221 E; Dio Chrys. "Or." 55, 560
D, 564 A.
Soc. And am I to hold away from their attendant topics also--the just,
the holy, and the like?
Most assuredly (answered Charicles), and from cowherds in particular;
or else see that you do not lessen the number of the herd yourself.
Thus the secret was out. The remark of Socrates about the cattle had
come to their ears, and they could not forgive the author of it.
Perhaps enough has been said to explain the kind of intimacy which had
The Memorabilia |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Human Drift by Jack London: he can get at home.
It has always been so, from the time of the first pre-human
anthropoid crossing a mountain-divide in quest of better berry-
bushes beyond, down to the latest Slovak, arriving on our shores
to-day, to go to work in the coal-mines of Pennsylvania. These
migratory movements of peoples have been called drifts, and the
word is apposite. Unplanned, blind, automatic, spurred on by the
pain of hunger, man has literally drifted his way around the
planet. There have been drifts in the past, innumerable and
forgotten, and so remote that no records have been left, or
composed of such low-typed humans or pre-humans that they made no
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: many thanks to many people, and ask to be remembered by them in
turn.
The prison style is absolutely and entirely wrong. I would give
anything to be able to alter it when I go out. I intend to try.
But there is nothing in the world so wrong but that the spirit of
humanity, which is the spirit of love, the spirit of the Christ who
is not in churches, may make it, if not right, at least possible to
be borne without too much bitterness of heart.
I know also that much is waiting for me outside that is very
delightful, from what St. Francis of Assisi calls 'my brother the
wind, and my sister the rain,' lovely things both of them, down to
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