| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: made into Arabic, first, it is said, from Persian and Syriac
translations; the former of which had been made during the sixth and
seventh centuries, by the wreck of the Neoplatonist party, during their
visit to the philosophic Chozroos. A century after, they filled
Alexandria. After them Almansoor, Hairoun Alraschid, and their
successors, who patronised the Nestorian Christians, obtained from them
translations of the philosophic, medical, and astronomical Greek works;
while the last of the Omniades, Abdalrahman, had introduced the same
literary taste into Spain, where, in the thirteenth century, Averroes
and Maimonides rivalled the fame of Avicenna, who had flourished at
Bagdad a century before.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Village Rector by Honore de Balzac: Catherine had remained in the Correze she would by this time have
looked like an old woman, wrinkled and withered; her complexion, once
rosy, would have coarsened; but Paris, though it paled her, had
preserved her beauty. Illness, toil, and grief had endowed her with
the mysterious gifts of melancholy, the inward vitalizing thought,
which is lacking to poor country-folk whose lives are almost animal.
Her dress, full of that Parisian taste which all women, even the least
coquettish, contract so readily, distinguished her still further from
an ordinary peasant-woman. In her ignorance as to what was before her,
and having no means of judging Madame Graslin, she appeared very shy
and shame-faced.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad: his abilities, every feeling and achievement of his man-
hood, had been indissolubly connected with ships. He
had served ships; he had owned ships; and even the
years of his actual retirement from the sea had been made
bearable by the idea that he had only to stretch out his
hand full of money to get a ship. He had been at
liberty to feel as though he were the owner of all the
ships in the world. The selling of this one was weary
work; but when she passed from him at last, when he
signed the last receipt, it was as though all the ships
had gone out of the world together, leaving him on the
End of the Tether |
