| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: THEAETETUS: What definition?
STRANGER: We said that being was an active or passive energy, arising out
of a certain power which proceeds from elements meeting with one another.
Perhaps your ears, Theaetetus, may fail to catch their answer, which I
recognize because I have been accustomed to hear it.
THEAETETUS: And what is their answer?
STRANGER: They deny the truth of what we were just now saying to the
aborigines about existence.
THEAETETUS: What was that?
STRANGER: Any power of doing or suffering in a degree however slight was
held by us to be a sufficient definition of being?
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Vicar of Tours by Honore de Balzac: unhappy man, whose madness she so penetrated that she never believed
him mad. She was simple in manner, frank in speech, and her pallid
face was not lacking in strength and character, though its features
were regular. She never spoke of the events of her life. But at times
a sudden quiver passed over her as she listened to the story of some
sad or dreadful incident, thus betraying the emotions that great
sufferings had developed within her. She had come to live at Tours
after losing the companion of her life; but she was not appreciated
there at her true value and was thought to be merely an amiable woman.
She did much good, and attached herself, by preference, to feeble
beings. For that reason the poor vicar had naturally inspired her with
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Catriona by Robert Louis Stevenson: the worst kind of suicide, besides, which is to get hanged at the
King's charges.
What was I doing it for? I asked, as I went down the high Street and
out north by Leith Wynd. First I said it was to save James Stewart;
and no doubt the memory of his distress, and his wife's cries, and a
word or so I had let drop on that occasion worked upon me strongly. At
the same time I reflected that it was (or ought to be) the most
indifferent matter to my father's son, whether James died in his bed or
from a scaffold. He was Alan's cousin, to be sure; but so far as
regarded Alan, the best thing would be to lie low, and let the King,
and his Grace of Argyll, and the corbie crows, pick the bones of his
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