| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Crito by Plato: that they will be better cared for and educated here if you are still
alive, although absent from them; for your friends will take care of them?
Do you fancy that if you are an inhabitant of Thessaly they will take care
of them, and if you are an inhabitant of the other world that they will not
take care of them? Nay; but if they who call themselves friends are good
for anything, they will--to be sure they will.
'Listen, then, Socrates, to us who have brought you up. Think not of life
and children first, and of justice afterwards, but of justice first, that
you may be justified before the princes of the world below. For neither
will you nor any that belong to you be happier or holier or juster in this
life, or happier in another, if you do as Crito bids. Now you depart in
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Ten Years Later by Alexandre Dumas: which checkered the ground of this path according as the
trees were more or less in leaf, the young prince perceived
a gentleman walking with his arms behind him, apparently
plunged in a deep meditation. Without doubt, he had often
had this gentleman described to him, for, without
hesitating, Charles II. walked straight up to him. At the
sound of his footsteps, the Comte de la Fere raised his
head, and seeing an unknown man of noble and elegant
carriage coming towards him, he raised his hat and waited.
At some paces from him, Charles II. likewise took off his
hat. Then, as if in reply to the comte's mute interrogation,
Ten Years Later |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne: was the stage-agent. The present specimen of the genus was a
wilted and smoke-dried man, wrinkled and red-nosed, in a smartly
cut, brown, bobtailed coat, with brass buttons, who, for a length
of time unknown, had kept his desk and corner in the bar-room,
and was still puffing what seemed to be the same cigar that he
had lighted twenty years before. He had great fame as a dry
joker, though, perhaps, less on account of any intrinsic humor
than from a certain flavor of brandy-toddy and tobacco-smoke,
which impregnated all his ideas and expressions, as well as his
person. Another well-remembered, though strangely altered, face
was that of Lawyer Giles, as people still called him in courtesy;
The Snow Image |
