| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner: forks that had stuck in the thatch for twenty years. He placed the black
bottles neatly in rows on an old box in the corner, and piled the skins on
one another, and sorted the rubbish in all the boxes; and at eleven o'clock
his work was almost done. He seated himself on the packing-case which had
once held Waldo's books, and proceeded to examine the contents of another
which he had not yet looked at. It was carelessly nailed down. He
loosened one plank, and began to lift out various articles of female
attire--old-fashioned caps, aprons, dresses with long pointed bodies such
as he remembered to have seen his mother wear when he was a little child.
He shook them out carefully to see there were no moths, and then sat down
to fold them up again one by one. They had belonged to Em's mother, and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Euthydemus by Plato: them; and then Euthydemus came and sat down by the youth, and the other by
me on the left hand; the rest anywhere. I saluted the brothers, whom I had
not seen for a long time; and then I said to Cleinias: Here are two wise
men, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus, Cleinias, wise not in a small but in a
large way of wisdom, for they know all about war,--all that a good general
ought to know about the array and command of an army, and the whole art of
fighting in armour: and they know about law too, and can teach a man how
to use the weapons of the courts when he is injured.
They heard me say this, but only despised me. I observed that they looked
at one another, and both of them laughed; and then Euthydemus said: Those,
Socrates, are matters which we no longer pursue seriously; to us they are
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Firm of Nucingen by Honore de Balzac: "Unless he is miserly, or very much above the ordinary level," added
Blondet.
"Well, Godefroid sojourned in the four capitals of Italy," continued
Bixiou. "He lived in England and Germany, he spent some little time at
St. Petersburg, he ran over Holland but he parted company with the
aforesaid thirty thousand francs by living as if he had thirty
thousand a year. Everywhere he found the same supreme de volaille, the
same aspics, and French wines; he heard French spoken wherever he went
--in short, he never got away from Paris. He ought, of course, to have
tried to deprave his disposition, to fence himself in triple brass, to
get rid of his illusions, to learn to hear anything said without a
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