| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Alcibiades I by Plato: comparative length of the span and of the cubit? Does not the art of
measure?
ALCIBIADES: Yes.
SOCRATES: Individuals are agreed with one another about this; and states,
equally?
ALCIBIADES: Yes.
SOCRATES: And the same holds of the balance?
ALCIBIADES: True.
SOCRATES: But what is the other agreement of which you speak, and about
what? what art can give that agreement? And does that which gives it to
the state give it also to the individual, so as to make him consistent with
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Silas Marner by George Eliot: soon have been up with the hounds again, when the fatal accident
happened; and hence he was between eager riders in advance, not
troubling themselves about what happened behind them, and far-off
stragglers, who were as likely as not to pass quite aloof from the
line of road in which Wildfire had fallen. Dunstan, whose nature it
was to care more for immediate annoyances than for remote
consequences, no sooner recovered his legs, and saw that it was all
over with Wildfire, than he felt a satisfaction at the absence of
witnesses to a position which no swaggering could make enviable.
Reinforcing himself, after his shake, with a little brandy and much
swearing, he walked as fast as he could to a coppice on his right
 Silas Marner |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving: found the hat of the unfortunate Ichabod, and close beside it a
shattered pumpkin.
The brook was searched, but the body of the schoolmaster was
not to be discovered. Hans Van Ripper as executor of his estate,
examined the bundle which contained all his worldly effects. They
consisted of two shirts and a half; two stocks for the neck; a
pair or two of worsted stockings; an old pair of corduroy small-
clothes; a rusty razor; a book of psalm tunes full of dog's-ears;
and a broken pitch-pipe. As to the books and furniture of the
schoolhouse, they belonged to the community, excepting Cotton
Mather's History of Witchcraft, a New England Almanac, and
 The Legend of Sleepy Hollow |