| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Crito by Plato: CRITO: He ought to do what he thinks right.
SOCRATES: But if this is true, what is the application? In leaving the
prison against the will of the Athenians, do I wrong any? or rather do I
not wrong those whom I ought least to wrong? Do I not desert the
principles which were acknowledged by us to be just--what do you say?
CRITO: I cannot tell, Socrates, for I do not know.
SOCRATES: Then consider the matter in this way:--Imagine that I am about
to play truant (you may call the proceeding by any name which you like),
and the laws and the government come and interrogate me: 'Tell us,
Socrates,' they say; 'what are you about? are you not going by an act of
yours to overturn us--the laws, and the whole state, as far as in you lies?
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Country Doctor by Honore de Balzac: doctor's interest in his patient; and the sight of that patient
completely changed the current of his thoughts.
Much as the old cavalry officer had seen in the course of his
soldier's career, he felt a thrill of surprise and horror at the sight
of a human face which could never have been lighted up with thought--a
livid face in which a look of dumb suffering showed so plainly--the
same look that is sometimes worn by a child too young to speak, and
too weak to cry any longer; in short, it was the wholly animal face of
an old dying cretin. The cretin was the one variety of the human
species with which the commandant had not yet come in contact. At the
sight of the deep, circular folds of skin on the forehead, the sodden,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: many an hour ere now, was brought in solemn procession and placed on
an altar at the foot of the prince's bed; and in the afternoon there
entered, with a procession likewise, a shrine containing the bones
of a holy anchorite, one Fray Diego, "whose life and miracles," says
Olivarez, "are so notorious:" and the bones of St. Justus and St.
Pastor, the tutelar saints of the university of Alcala. Amid solemn
litanies the relics of Fray Diego were laid upon the prince's
pillow, and the sudarium, or mortuary cloth, which had covered his
face, was placed upon the prince's forehead.
Modern science might object that the presence of so many personages,
however pious or well intentioned, in a sick chamber on a hot
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