| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Soul of a Bishop by H. G. Wells: craving to be pseudo-deeper, pseudo-simpler than us all, the need
of personal excitement. I know that you were never quite
contented to believe in God at second-hand. You wanted to be
taken notice of--personally. Except for some few hints to you,
I have never breathed a word of these doubts to any human being;
I have always hoped that the ripening that comes with years and
experience would give you an increasing strength against the
dangers of emotionalism and against your strong, deep, quiet
sense of your exceptional personal importance...."
The bishop read thus far, and then sat reflecting.
Was it just?
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte: Mrs. Reed that she would rear and maintain me as one of her own
children. Mrs. Reed probably considered she had kept this promise;
and so she had, I dare say, as well as her nature would permit her;
but how could she really like an interloper not of her race, and
unconnected with her, after her husband's death, by any tie? It
must have been most irksome to find herself bound by a hard-wrung
pledge to stand in the stead of a parent to a strange child she
could not love, and to see an uncongenial alien permanently intruded
on her own family group.
A singular notion dawned upon me. I doubted not--never doubted--
that if Mr. Reed had been alive he would have treated me kindly; and
Jane Eyre |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Apology by Plato: 'a king of men.' He would rather not appear insolent, if he could avoid it
(ouch os authadizomenos touto lego). Neither is he desirous of hastening
his own end, for life and death are simply indifferent to him. But such a
defence as would be acceptable to his judges and might procure an
acquittal, it is not in his nature to make. He will not say or do anything
that might pervert the course of justice; he cannot have his tongue bound
even 'in the throat of death.' With his accusers he will only fence and
play, as he had fenced with other 'improvers of youth,' answering the
Sophist according to his sophistry all his life long. He is serious when
he is speaking of his own mission, which seems to distinguish him from all
other reformers of mankind, and originates in an accident. The dedication
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