| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Return of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs: whose business it was, separate the innocent from the guilty.
But they found that it was one thing to tell this well-
dressed young man that he was under arrest, but quite
another to enforce it.
"I am guilty of no offense," he said quietly. "I have but
sought to defend myself. I do not know why the woman has
told you what she has. She can have no enmity against me,
for never until I came to this room in response to her cries
for help had I seen her."
"Come, come," said one of the officers; "there are judges
to listen to all that," and he advanced to lay his hand upon
The Return of Tarzan |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad: been known to exchange as much as a frank Good-morn-
ing with any of his shipmates. He did not seem aware
that men came and went in the world; he did not seem
to see them at all. Indeed he never recognized his ship
mates on shore. At table (the four white men of the
Sofala messed together) he sat looking into his plate
dispassionately, but at the end of the meal would jump
up and bolt down below as if a sudden thought had im-
pelled him to rush and see whether somebody had not
stolen the engines while he dined. In port at the end of
the trip he went ashore regularly, but no one knew
End of the Tether |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Republic by Plato: does not say that happiness consists in the contemplation of the idea of
justice, and still less will he be tempted to affirm the Stoical paradox
that the just man can be happy on the rack. But first he dwells on the
difficulty of the problem and insists on restoring man to his natural
condition, before he will answer the question at all. He too will frame an
ideal, but his ideal comprehends not only abstract justice, but the whole
relations of man. Under the fanciful illustration of the large letters he
implies that he will only look for justice in society, and that from the
State he will proceed to the individual. His answer in substance amounts
to this,--that under favourable conditions, i.e. in the perfect State,
justice and happiness will coincide, and that when justice has been once
The Republic |
