| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne: understand, my friends, that before undertaking the work of installation in
earnest it is not enough to have found out that this land is an island; we
must, as nearly as possible, know at what distance it is situated, either
from the American continent or Australia, or from the principal
archipelagoes of the Pacific."
"In fact," said the reporter, "instead of building a house it would be
more important to build a boat, if by chance we are not more than a hundred
miles from an inhabited coast."
"That is why," returned Harding, "I am going to try this evening to
calculate the latitude of Lincoln Island, and to-morrow, at midday, I will
try to calculate the longitude."
The Mysterious Island |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: small?
PROTARCHUS: Certainly not.
SOCRATES: Then here we have a third state, over and above that of pleasure
and of pain?
PROTARCHUS: Very true.
SOCRATES: And do not forget that there is such a state; it will make a
great difference in our judgment of pleasure, whether we remember this or
not. And I should like to say a few words about it.
PROTARCHUS: What have you to say?
SOCRATES: Why, you know that if a man chooses the life of wisdom, there is
no reason why he should not live in this neutral state.
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Elizabeth and her German Garden by Marie Annette Beauchamp: a terrible amount of precious time, and--and with shame I confess
that my sympathies are all with the pudding and the grammar.
It cannot be right to be the slave of one's household gods, and I protest
that if my furniture ever annoyed me by wanting to be dusted when I
wanted to be doing something else, and there was no one to do the dusting
for me, I would cast it all into the nearest bonfire and sit and warm
my toes at the flames with great contentment, triumphantly selling
my dusters to the very next pedlar who was weak enough to buy them.
Parsons' wives have to do the housework and cooking themselves,
and are thus not only cooks and housemaids, but if they have children--
and they always do have children--they are head and under nurse as well;
Elizabeth and her German Garden |
