| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Critias by Plato: utmost of his power, until they made the building a marvel to behold for
size and for beauty. And beginning from the sea they bored a canal of
three hundred feet in width and one hundred feet in depth and fifty stadia
in length, which they carried through to the outermost zone, making a
passage from the sea up to this, which became a harbour, and leaving an
opening sufficient to enable the largest vessels to find ingress.
Moreover, they divided at the bridges the zones of land which parted the
zones of sea, leaving room for a single trireme to pass out of one zone
into another, and they covered over the channels so as to leave a way
underneath for the ships; for the banks were raised considerably above the
water. Now the largest of the zones into which a passage was cut from the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: Karénina," my father set great store by his opinion and
valued his critical instinct very highly.
"It is enough for me that that is your opinion," he writes
in a letter of 1872, probably apropos of the "Alphabet."
In 1876, apropos of "Anna Karénina" this time, my
father wrote:
"You ask me whether you have understood my novel aright, and
what I think of your opinion. Of course you understood it aright.
Of course I am overjoyed at your understanding of it; but it does
not follow that everybody will understand it as you do."
But it was not only his critical work that drew my father to
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Lone Star Ranger by Zane Grey: If his visit surprised Laramie he did not show any evidence.
But Lawson showed rage as he saw the ranger, and then a dark
glint flitted from the eyes that shifted from Duane to Laramie
and back again. Duane leaned easily against the counter.
"Say, that was a bad break of yours," Lawson said. "If you come
fooling round the ranch again there'll be hell."
It seemed strange that a man who had lived west of the Pecos
for ten years could not see in Duane something which forbade
that kind of talk. It certainly was not nerve Lawson showed;
men of courage were seldom intolerant. With the matchless nerve
that characterized the great gunmen of the day there was a
 The Lone Star Ranger |