| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Protagoras by Plato: still think that there are men who are most ignorant and yet most
courageous?
You seem to have a great ambition to make me answer, Socrates, and
therefore I will gratify you, and say, that this appears to me to be
impossible consistently with the argument.
My only object, I said, in continuing the discussion, has been the desire
to ascertain the nature and relations of virtue; for if this were clear, I
am very sure that the other controversy which has been carried on at great
length by both of us--you affirming and I denying that virtue can be
taught--would also become clear. The result of our discussion appears to
me to be singular. For if the argument had a human voice, that voice would
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: "Annals") a notice of the decease of Mr. Surveyor Pue, about
fourscore years ago; and likewise, in a newspaper of recent
times, an account of the digging up of his remains in the little
graveyard of St. Peter's Church, during the renewal of that
edifice. Nothing, if I rightly call to mind, was left of my
respected predecessor, save an imperfect skeleton, and some
fragments of apparel, and a wig of majestic frizzle, which,
unlike the head that it once adorned, was in very satisfactory
preservation. But, on examining the papers which the parchment
commission served to envelop, I found more traces of Mr. Pue's
mental part, and the internal operations of his head, than the
The Scarlet Letter |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Pool of Blood in the Pastor's Study by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner: looked bare and repellant, covered with its ugly yellow paint, and
with all the windows secured with heavy iron bars. The trees that
surrounded it were tall and thick-foliaged, casting an added gloom
over the forbidding appearance of the house. At the foot of the
hill was a high iron fence, cutting off what lay behind it from
all the rest of the world. For this ugly yellow house enclosed
in its walls a goodly sum of hopeless human misery and misfortune.
It was an insane asylum.
For twenty years now, the asylum had stood on its hill, a source of
superstitious terror to the villagers, but at the same time a source
of added income. It meant money for them, for it afforded a
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