| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: free will, but either through ignorance or from some unhappy necessity.
PROTARCHUS: Certainly that seems to be true.
SOCRATES: And now have I not sufficiently shown that Philebus' goddess is
not to be regarded as identical with the good?
PHILEBUS: Neither is your 'mind' the good, Socrates, for that will be open
to the same objections.
SOCRATES: Perhaps, Philebus, you may be right in saying so of my 'mind';
but of the true, which is also the divine mind, far otherwise. However, I
will not at present claim the first place for mind as against the mixed
life; but we must come to some understanding about the second place. For
you might affirm pleasure and I mind to be the cause of the mixed life; and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie: "No right? Have I *NO right, Mary?" he said unsteadily. He
stretched out his hands. "Mary----"
For a moment, I thought she wavered. A softer expression came
over her face, then suddenly she turned almost fiercely away.
"None!"
She was walking away when John sprang after her, and caught her
by the arm.
"Mary"--his voice was very quiet now--"are you in love with this
fellow Bauerstein?"
She hesitated, and suddenly there swept across her face a strange
expression, old as the hills, yet with something eternally young
The Mysterious Affair at Styles |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: individual discovers a revelation addressed to himself alone, on
the same vast sheet of record. In such a case, it could only be
the symptom of a highly disordered mental state, when a man,
rendered morbidly self-contemplative by long, intense, and secret
pain, had extended his egotism over the whole expanse of nature,
until the firmament itself should appear no more than a fitting
page for his soul's history and fate.
We impute it, therefore, solely to the disease in his own eye and
heart that the minister, looking upward to the zenith, beheld
there the appearance of an immense letter -- the letter A --
The Scarlet Letter |
