| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Second Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling: chuckling as he looked.
"Mowgli the Frog have I been," said he to himself; "Mowgli the
Wolf have I said that I am. Now Mowgli the Ape must I be before
I am Mowgli the Buck. At the end I shall be Mowgli the Man.
Ho!" and he slid his thumb along the eighteen-inch blade of
his knife.
Won-tolla's trail, all rank with dark blood-spots, ran under
a forest of thick trees that grew close together and stretched
away north-eastward, gradually growing thinner and thinner to
within two miles of the Bee Rocks. From the last tree to the low
scrub of the Bee Rocks was open country, where there was hardly
The Second Jungle Book |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Juana by Honore de Balzac: its hilt violently on Juana's door as he shouted,--
"Open! open! open! Juana!"
Juana did not open, for she needed time to conceal Montefiore. She
knew nothing of what was passing in the salon; the double portieres of
thick tapestry deadened all sounds.
"Madame, I lied to you in saying I could not find the key. Here it
is," added Perez, taking it from a sideboard. "But it is useless.
Juana's key is in the lock; her door is barricaded. We have been
deceived, my wife!" he added, turning to Dona Lagounia. "There is a
man in Juana's room."
"Impossible! By my eternal salvation I say it is impossible!" said his
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: subtle adjustment of question and answer, the lively play of fancy, the
power of drawing characters, are wanting in them. But the Platonic
dialogue is a drama as well as a dialogue, of which Socrates is the central
figure, and there are lesser performers as well:--the insolence of
Thrasymachus, the anger of Callicles and Anytus, the patronizing style of
Protagoras, the self-consciousness of Prodicus and Hippias, are all part of
the entertainment. To reproduce this living image the same sort of effort
is required as in translating poetry. The language, too, is of a finer
quality; the mere prose English is slow in lending itself to the form of
question and answer, and so the ease of conversation is lost, and at the
same time the dialectical precision with which the steps of the argument
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