| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: posterity, but to have the use of a treasure of wealth and honour, and to
leave none to your successors, because you have neither money nor
reputation of your own, is alike base and dishonourable. And if you follow
our precepts you will be received by us as friends, when the hour of
destiny brings you hither; but if you neglect our words and are disgraced
in your lives, no one will welcome or receive you. This is the message
which is to be delivered to our children.
'Some of us have fathers and mothers still living, and we would urge them,
if, as is likely, we shall die, to bear the calamity as lightly as
possible, and not to condole with one another; for they have sorrows
enough, and will not need any one to stir them up. While we gently heal
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Coxon Fund by Henry James: accident, that, as a lecturer, would still make the paying public
aware of our great man, but the fact remained that in the case of
an inspiration so unequal there was treachery, there was fallacy at
least, in the very conception of a series. In our scrutiny of ways
and means we were inevitably subject to the old convention of the
synopsis, the syllabus, partly of course not to lose the advantage
of his grand free hand in drawing up such things; but for myself I
laughed at our playbills even while I stickled for them. It was
indeed amusing work to be scrupulous for Frank Saltram, who also at
moments laughed about it, so far as the comfort of a sigh so
unstudied as to be cheerful might pass for such a sound. He
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Dust by Mr. And Mrs. Haldeman-Julius: crudest attempt to welcome her. It would have been as easy for
Rose to be cheerful in the midst of mere squalor as for a flower
to bloom white in a crowded tenement, but at the swift
realization of the lack of tenderness for her which this
indifference to her first impressions so clearly expressed, her
faith in the man she had married began to wither. He had failed
her in the very quality in which she had put her trust. Already,
he had carelessly dropped the thoughtfulness by which he had won
her. She wondered how she could have made herself believe that
Martin loved her. "He has tried so hard in every way to show me
how much I would mean to him," she justified herself. "But now he
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