| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac: air of superiority to their husbands, and their indifference--"
She let her hand fall along the arm of her chair, without ending her
sentence, but the gesture admirably completed the speech. She saw
d'Arthez watching her flexible figure, gracefully bending in the
depths of her easy-chair, noting the folds of her gown, and the pretty
little ruffle which sported on her breast,--one of those audacities of
the toilet that are suited only to slender waists,--and she resumed
the thread of her thoughts as if she were speaking to herself:--
"But I will say no more. You writers have ended by making ridiculous
all women who think they are misunderstood, or ill-mated, and who try
to make themselves dramatically interesting,--attempts which seem to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Edition of The Ambassadors by Henry James: imagination reacted before one could stop it. This perpetual
reaction put a price, if one would, on pauses; but it piled up
consequences till there was scarce room to pick one's steps among
them. What call had he, at such a juncture, for example, to like
Chad's very house? High broad clear--he was expert enough to make
out in a moment that it was admirably built--it fairly embarrassed
our friend by the quality that, as he would have said, it "sprang"
on him. He had struck off the fancy that it might, as a
preliminary, be of service to him to be seen, by a happy accident,
from the third-story windows, which took all the March sun, but of
what service was it to find himself making out after a moment that
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: this Critias replies that the science or knowledge of good and evil, and
all the other sciences, are regulated by the higher science or knowledge of
knowledge. Socrates replies by again dividing the abstract from the
concrete, and asks how this knowledge conduces to happiness in the same
definite way in which medicine conduces to health.
And now, after making all these concessions, which are really inadmissible,
we are still as far as ever from ascertaining the nature of temperance,
which Charmides has already discovered, and had therefore better rest in
the knowledge that the more temperate he is the happier he will be, and not
trouble himself with the speculations of Socrates.
In this Dialogue may be noted (1) The Greek ideal of beauty and goodness,
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