| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Odyssey by Homer: child; but in spite of all this she showed no consideration for
the sorrows of her mistress, and used to misconduct herself with
Eurymachus, with whom she was in love.
"Poor wretch," said she, "are you gone clean out of your mind?
Go and sleep in some smithy, or place of public gossips, instead
of chattering here. Are you not ashamed of opening your mouth
before your betters--so many of them too? Has the wine been
getting into your head, or do you always babble in this way? You
seem to have lost your wits because you beat the tramp Irus;
take care that a better man than he does not come and cudgel you
about the head till he pack you bleeding out of the house."
The Odyssey |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Christ in Flanders by Honore de Balzac: to the will of God, like folk whose wont it is to fall in
instinctively with the ways of Nature like cattle. At the one end of
the boat stood riches, pride, learning, debauchery, and crime--human
society, such as art and thought and education and worldly interests
and laws have made it; and at this end there was terror and wailing,
innumerable different impulses all repressed by hideous doubts--at
this end, and at this only, the agony of fear.
Above all these human lives stood a strong man, the skipper; no doubts
assailed him, the chief, the king, the fatalist among them. He was
trusting in himself rather than in Providence, crying, "Bail away!"
instead of "Holy Virgin," defying the storm, in fact, and struggling
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Critias by Plato: an enclosure of gold; this was the spot where the family of the ten princes
first saw the light, and thither the people annually brought the fruits of
the earth in their season from all the ten portions, to be an offering to
each of the ten. Here was Poseidon's own temple which was a stadium in
length, and half a stadium in width, and of a proportionate height, having
a strange barbaric appearance. All the outside of the temple, with the
exception of the pinnacles, they covered with silver, and the pinnacles
with gold. In the interior of the temple the roof was of ivory, curiously
wrought everywhere with gold and silver and orichalcum; and all the other
parts, the walls and pillars and floor, they coated with orichalcum. In
the temple they placed statues of gold: there was the god himself standing
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