| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Silverado Squatters by Robert Louis Stevenson: door and window, a faint, disused starshine came into the
room like mist; and when we were once in bed, we lay,
awaiting sleep, in a haunted, incomplete obscurity. At first
the silence of the night was utter. Then a high wind began
in the distance among the tree-tops, and for hours continued
to grow higher. It seemed to me much such a wind as we had
found on our visit; yet here in our open chamber we were
fanned only by gentle and refreshing draughts, so deep was
the canyon, so close our house was planted under the
overhanging rock.
THE HUNTER'S FAMILY
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Salammbo by Gustave Flaubert: to them:
"When the Ligurians, Greeks, Balearians, and men of Italy are paid,
they will return. But as for you, you will remain in Africa, scattered
through your tribes, and without any means of defence! It will be then
that the Republic will take its revenge! Mistrust the journey! Are you
going to believe everything that is said? Both the Suffets are agreed,
and this one is imposing on you! Remember the Island of Bones, and
Xanthippus, whom they sent back to Sparta in a rotten galley!"
"How are we to proceed?" they asked.
"Reflect!" said Spendius.
The two following days were spent in paying the men of Magdala,
Salammbo |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: happiness and misery in general--what they are, and how a man is to attain
the one and avoid the other--when that narrow, keen, little legal mind is
called to account about all this, he gives the philosopher his revenge; for
dizzied by the height at which he is hanging, whence he looks down into
space, which is a strange experience to him, he being dismayed, and lost,
and stammering broken words, is laughed at, not by Thracian handmaidens or
any other uneducated persons, for they have no eye for the situation, but
by every man who has not been brought up a slave. Such are the two
characters, Theodorus: the one of the freeman, who has been trained in
liberty and leisure, whom you call the philosopher,--him we cannot blame
because he appears simple and of no account when he has to perform some
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