| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Alcibiades II by Platonic Imitator: ALCIBIADES: I agree.
SOCRATES: And if any one knows how to ride or to shoot with the bow or to
box or to wrestle, or to engage in any other sort of contest or to do
anything whatever which is in the nature of an art,--what do you call him
who knows what is best according to that art? Do you not speak of one who
knows what is best in riding as a good rider?
ALCIBIADES: Yes.
SOCRATES: And in a similar way you speak of a good boxer or a good flute-
player or a good performer in any other art?
ALCIBIADES: True.
SOCRATES: But is it necessary that the man who is clever in any of these
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac: neighborhood, just when he had planned to move from the Rue du
Fouarre, which he as little liked to live in as his wife did. The
great lawyer, the clear-sighted criminal judge, whose superiority
seemed to his colleagues a form of aberration, had for five years been
watching legal results without seeing their causes. As he scrambled up
into the lofts, as he saw the poverty, as he studied the desperate
necessities which gradually bring the poor to criminal acts, as he
estimated their long struggles, compassion filled his soul. The judge
then became the Saint Vincent de Paul of these grown-up children,
these suffering toilers. The transformation was not immediately
complete. Beneficence has its temptations as vice has. Charity
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe: the truth, the disadvantage of the women is a terrible scandal
upon the men, and it lies here, and here only; namely, that the
age is so wicked, and the sex so debauched, that, in short, the
number of such men as an honest woman ought to meddle
with is small indeed, and it is but here and there that a man is
to be found who is fit for a woman to venture upon.
But the consequence even of that too amounts to no more
than this, that women ought to be the more nice; for how do
we know the just character of the man that makes the offer?
To say that the woman should be the more easy on this
occasion, is to say we should be the forwarder to venture
Moll Flanders |
