| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: body exists they altogether despise him, and will hear of nothing but body.
THEAETETUS: I have often met with such men, and terrible fellows they are.
STRANGER: And that is the reason why their opponents cautiously defend
themselves from above, out of an unseen world, mightily contending that
true essence consists of certain intelligible and incorporeal ideas; the
bodies of the materialists, which by them are maintained to be the very
truth, they break up into little bits by their arguments, and affirm them
to be, not essence, but generation and motion. Between the two armies,
Theaetetus, there is always an endless conflict raging concerning these
matters.
THEAETETUS: True.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Duchesse de Langeais by Honore de Balzac: several men, who rapidly flung a handkerchief over her mouth,
bound her hand and foot, and carried her off. She shrieked
aloud.
"Madame, our orders are to kill you if you scream," a voice
said in her ear.
So great was the Duchess's terror, that she could never recollect
how nor by whom she was transported. When she came to herself,
she was lying on a couch in a bachelor's lodging, her hands and
feet tied with silken cords. In spite of herself, she shrieked
aloud as she looked round and met Armand de Montriveau's eyes.
He was sitting in his dressing-gown, quietly smoking a cigar in
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Herland by Charlotte Gilman: multiplies by five every thirty years it soon reaches the limits
of a country, especially a small one like this. They very soon
eliminated all the grazing cattle--sheep were the last to go, I believe.
Also, they worked out a system of intensive agriculture surpassing
anything I ever heard of, with the very forests all reset with
fruit- or nut-bearing trees.
Do what they would, however, there soon came a time when they
were confronted with the problem of "the pressure of population"
in an acute form. There was really crowding, and with it,
unavoidably, a decline in standards.
And how did those women meet it?
Herland |
