| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne: as fifteen to twenty. May I be excused for saying that I was
forty years old?
But Conseil had one fault: he was ceremonious to a degree,
and would never speak to me but in the third person,
which was sometimes provoking.
"Conseil," said I again, beginning with feverish hands to make
preparations for my departure.
Certainly I was sure of this devoted boy. As a rule, I never asked
him if it were convenient for him or not to follow me in my travels;
but this time the expedition in question might be prolonged,
and the enterprise might be hazardous in pursuit of an animal capable
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Second Home by Honore de Balzac: The young man took the letter, and in spite of the cold, tried to
identify the writing by the gleam of a dull lamp fast dying out. "From
my father!" he exclaimed, as he took his bedroom candle, which the
porter at last had lighted. And he ran up to his room to read the
following epistle:--
"Set off by the next mail; and if you can get here soon enough,
your fortune is made. Mademoiselle Angelique Bontems has lost her
sister; she is now an only child; and, as we know, she does not
hate you. Madame Bontems can now leave her about forty thousand
francs a year, besides whatever she may give her when she marries.
I have prepared the way.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Critias by Plato: great Platonic trilogy of the Sophist, Statesman, Philosopher, was never
completed. Timaeus had brought down the origin of the world to the
creation of man, and the dawn of history was now to succeed the philosophy
of nature. The Critias is also connected with the Republic. Plato, as he
has already told us (Tim.), intended to represent the ideal state engaged
in a patriotic conflict. This mythical conflict is prophetic or symbolical
of the struggle of Athens and Persia, perhaps in some degree also of the
wars of the Greeks and Carthaginians, in the same way that the Persian is
prefigured by the Trojan war to the mind of Herodotus, or as the narrative
of the first part of the Aeneid is intended by Virgil to foreshadow the
wars of Carthage and Rome. The small number of the primitive Athenian
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