| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Odyssey by Homer: his flocks. And he bore a grievous weight of dry wood,
against supper time. This log he cast down with a din
inside the cave, and in fear we fled to the secret place of
the rock. As for him, he drave his fat flocks into the wide
cavern, even all that he was wont to milk; but the males
both of the sheep and of the goats he left without in the
deep yard. Thereafter he lifted a huge doorstone and
weighty, and set it in the mouth of the cave, such an one
as two and twenty good four-wheeled wains could not raise
from the ground, so mighty a sheer rock did he set against
the doorway. Then he sat down and milked the ewes and
The Odyssey |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Passion in the Desert by Honore de Balzac: soldier fell into the hands of the Maugrabins, and was taken by these
Arabs into the deserts beyond the falls of the Nile.
In order to place a sufficient distance between themselves and the
French army, the Maugrabins made forced marches, and only halted when
night was upon them. They camped round a well overshadowed by palm
trees under which they had previously concealed a store of provisions.
Not surmising that the notion of flight would occur to their prisoner,
they contented themselves with binding his hands, and after eating a
few dates, and giving provender to their horses, went to sleep.
When the brave Provencal saw that his enemies were no longer watching
him, he made use of his teeth to steal a scimiter, fixed the blade
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: great writings, such as the Parmenides and the Politicus, which are wholly
devoid of Aristotelian (1) credentials may be fairly attributed to Plato,
on the ground of (2) length, (3) excellence, and (4) accordance with the
general spirit of his writings. Indeed the greater part of the evidence
for the genuineness of ancient Greek authors may be summed up under two
heads only: (1) excellence; and (2) uniformity of tradition--a kind of
evidence, which though in many cases sufficient, is of inferior value.
Proceeding upon these principles we appear to arrive at the conclusion that
nineteen-twentieths of all the writings which have ever been ascribed to
Plato, are undoubtedly genuine. There is another portion of them,
including the Epistles, the Epinomis, the dialogues rejected by the
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