| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: Mrs. Grose and my younger pupil had already rolled out of the gates.
Now I WAS, I said to myself, face to face with the elements,
and for much of the rest of the day, while I fought
my weakness, I could consider that I had been supremely rash.
It was a tighter place still than I had yet turned round in;
all the more that, for the first time, I could see in
the aspect of others a confused reflection of the crisis.
What had happened naturally caused them all to stare;
there was too little of the explained, throw out whatever we might,
in the suddenness of my colleague's act. The maids and the men
looked blank; the effect of which on my nerves was an aggravation
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Odyssey by Homer: prince. Howbeit, he had gone in his beaked ships up into
Ilios, with the sons of Atreus; but my famed name is
Aethon, being the younger of the twain and he was the first
born and the better man. There I saw Odysseus, and gave him
guest-gifts, for the might of the wind bare him too to
Crete, as he was making for Troy land, and had driven him
wandering past Malea. So he stayed his ships in Amnisus,
whereby is the cave of Eilithyia, in havens hard to win,
and scarce he escaped the tempest. Anon he came up to the
city and asked for Idomeneus, saying that he was his friend
and held by him in love and honour. But it was now the
The Odyssey |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Crito by Plato: covenants and agreements which you made with us at your leisure, not in any
haste or under any compulsion or deception, but after you have had seventy
years to think of them, during which time you were at liberty to leave the
city, if we were not to your mind, or if our covenants appeared to you to
be unfair. You had your choice, and might have gone either to Lacedaemon
or Crete, both which states are often praised by you for their good
government, or to some other Hellenic or foreign state. Whereas you, above
all other Athenians, seemed to be so fond of the state, or, in other words,
of us her laws (and who would care about a state which has no laws?), that
you never stirred out of her; the halt, the blind, the maimed, were not
more stationary in her than you were. And now you run away and forsake
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