| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Maitre Cornelius by Honore de Balzac: sops, hard and dry and cut with studied parsimony. Two stools placed
beside the table, on one of which the old woman sat down, showed that
the miserly pair were eating their suppers. Cornelius went to the door
and pushed two iron shutters into their place, closing, no doubt, the
loopholes through which they had been gazing into the street; then he
returned to his seat. Philippe Goulenoire (so called) next beheld the
brother and sister dipping their sops into the egg in turn, and with
the utmost gravity and the same precision with which soldiers dip
their spoons in regular rotation into the mess-pot. This performance
was done in silence. But as he ate, Cornelius examined the false
apprentice with as much care and scrutiny as if he were weighing an
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Persuasion by Jane Austen: nor life, to be called your own. It would be hard, indeed"
(with a faltering voice), "if woman's feelings were to be
added to all this."
"We shall never agree upon this question," Captain Harville
was beginning to say, when a slight noise called their attention
to Captain Wentworth's hitherto perfectly quiet division of the room.
It was nothing more than that his pen had fallen down; but Anne was
startled at finding him nearer than she had supposed, and half inclined
to suspect that the pen had only fallen because he had been
occupied by them, striving to catch sounds, which yet she did not think
he could have caught.
Persuasion |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Memorabilia by Xenophon: "Charm." 163 C.
Now while Socrates would have entirely admitted the propositions that
"it is a blessing and a benefit to a man to be a worker," and that "a
lazy do-nothing is a pestilent evil," that "work is good and idleness
a curse," the question arises, whom did he mean by workers? In his
vocabulary only those were good workmen[31] who were engaged on good
work; dicers and gamblers and others engaged on any other base and
ruinous business he stigmatised as the "idle drones"; and from this
point of view the quotation from Hesiod is unimpeachable--
No work is a disgrace; only idlesse is disgrace.
But there was a passage from Homer[32] for ever on his lips, as the
The Memorabilia |
