| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from La Grenadiere by Honore de Balzac: be worth, you wonder; La Grenadiere, with its stone staircase, its
beaten path and triple terrace, its two acres of vineyard, its
flowering roses about the balustrades, its worn steps, well-head,
rampant clematis, and cosmopolitan trees? It is idle to make a bid! La
Grenadiere will never be in the market; it was brought once and sold,
but that was in 1690; and the owner parted with it for forty thousand
francs, reluctant as any Arab of the desert to relinquish a favorite
horse. Since then it has remained in the same family, its pride, its
patrimonial jewel, its Regent diamond. "While you behold, you have and
hold," says the bard. And from La Grenadiere you behold three valleys
of Touraine and the cathedral towers aloft in air like a bit of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lysis by Plato: treated, with a manifest reference to the Lysis, in the eighth and ninth
books of the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. As in other writings of
Plato (for example, the Republic), there is a progress from unconscious
morality, illustrated by the friendship of the two youths, and also by the
sayings of the poets ('who are our fathers in wisdom,' and yet only tell us
half the truth, and in this particular instance are not much improved upon
by the philosophers), to a more comprehensive notion of friendship. This,
however, is far from being cleared of its perplexity. Two notions appear
to be struggling or balancing in the mind of Socrates:--First, the sense
that friendship arises out of human needs and wants; Secondly, that the
higher form or ideal of friendship exists only for the sake of the good.
Lysis |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Hiero by Xenophon: aiding or avenging their despotic lord, cities bestow large honours on
the slayer of a tyrant; ay, and in lieu of excommunicating the
tyrannicide from sacred shrines,[10] as is the case with murderers of
private citizens, they set up statues of the doers of such deeds[11]
in temples.
[9] "Matters are once more reversed precisely," "it is all 'topsy-
turvy.'"
[10] "And sacrifices." Cf. Dem. "c. Lept." 137, {en toinun tois peri
touton nomois o Drakon . . . katharon diorisen einai}. "Now in the
laws upon this subject, Draco, although he strove to make it
fearful and dreadful for a man to slay another, and ordained that
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