| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Lesser Hippias by Plato: SOCRATES: Then they are prudent, I suppose?
HIPPIAS: So they are--very.
SOCRATES: And if they are prudent, do they know or do they not know what
they do?
HIPPIAS: Of course, they know very well; and that is why they do mischief
to others.
SOCRATES: And having this knowledge, are they ignorant, or are they wise?
HIPPIAS: Wise, certainly; at least, in so far as they can deceive.
SOCRATES: Stop, and let us recall to mind what you are saying; are you not
saying that the false are powerful and prudent and knowing and wise in
those things about which they are false?
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Catherine de Medici by Honore de Balzac: middle of the night he saw the pale light of a lantern in the
corridor, after hearing the ponderous locks of the iron door which
closed the cellar groan as they were turned. The provost himself had
come to fetch Christophe. This attention to a prisoner who had been
left in his dark dungeon for hours without food, struck the poor lad
as singular. One of the provost's men bound his hands with a rope and
held him by the end of it until they reached one of the lower halls of
the chateau of Louis XII., which was evidently the antechamber to the
apartments of some important personage. The provost and his men bade
him sit upon a bench, and the man then bound his feet as he had before
bound his hands. On a sign from Monsieur de Montresor the man left the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited,
and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk
on her lovely face, as if she had asserted her membership in a rather
distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.
Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light.
Tom and Miss Baker sat at either end of the long couch and she read
aloud to him from the SATURDAY EVENING POST.--the words, murmurous and
uninflected, running together in a soothing tune. The lamp-light,
bright on his boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair,
glinted along the paper as she turned a page with a flutter of slender
muscles in her arms.
The Great Gatsby |
