| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Tom Sawyer Abroad by Mark Twain: it the next time he seen it -- which he didn't. So it
shows that for all the brag you hear about knowledge
being such a wonderful thing, instink is worth forty of
it for real unerringness. Jim says the same.
When we got back Jim dropped down and took us
in, and there was a young man there with a red skull-
cap and tassel on and a beautiful silk jacket and baggy
trousers with a shawl around his waist and pistols in it
that could talk English and wanted to hire to us as
guide and take us to Mecca and Medina and Central
Africa and everywheres for a half a dollar a day and his
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Albert Savarus by Honore de Balzac: Rodolphe, the son of a most charming Parisian woman, and a man of
mark, a nobleman of Brabant, was cursed with extreme sensitiveness.
From his infancy he had in everything shown a most ardent nature. In
him mere desire became a guiding force and the motive power of his
whole being, the stimulus to his imagination, the reason of his
actions. Notwithstanding the pains taken by a clever mother, who was
alarmed when she detected this predisposition, Rodolphe wished for
things as a poet imagines, as a mathematician calculates, as a painter
sketches, as a musician creates melodies. Tender-hearted, like his
mother, he dashed with inconceivable violence and impetus of thought
after the object of his desires; he annihilated time. While dreaming
Albert Savarus |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: true to the traditional recollection of them (compare Phaedr., Protag.; and
compare Sympos. with Phaedr.). We may also remark that Aristodemus is
called 'the little' in Xenophon's Memorabilia (compare Symp.).
The speeches have been said to follow each other in pairs: Phaedrus and
Pausanias being the ethical, Eryximachus and Aristophanes the physical
speakers, while in Agathon and Socrates poetry and philosophy blend
together. The speech of Phaedrus is also described as the mythological,
that of Pausanias as the political, that of Eryximachus as the scientific,
that of Aristophanes as the artistic (!), that of Socrates as the
philosophical. But these and similar distinctions are not found in Plato;
--they are the points of view of his critics, and seem to impede rather
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