| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: One afternoon Antonia and her father came over to our house to
get buttermilk, and lingered, as they usually did, until the sun
was low. just as they were leaving, Russian Peter drove up.
Pavel was very bad, he said, and wanted to talk to Mr. Shimerda
and his daughter; he had come to fetch them. When Antonia
and her father got into the wagon, I entreated grandmother
to let me go with them: I would gladly go without my supper,
I would sleep in the Shimerdas' barn and run home in the morning.
My plan must have seemed very foolish to her, but she was often
large-minded about humouring the desires of other people.
She asked Peter to wait a moment, and when she came back from
My Antonia |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: Alexa's elbow and was speaking to her in a low tone. The other
groups had scattered, straying in twos along the deck. It came
over Glennard that he should never again be able to see Flamel
speaking to his wife without the sense of sick mistrust that now
loosened his joints. . . .
Alexa, the next morning, over their early breakfast, surprised her
husband by an unexpected request.
"Will you bring me those letters from town?" she asked.
"What letters?" he said, putting down his cup. He felt himself as
helplessly vulnerable as a man who is lunged at in the dark.
"Mrs. Aubyn's. The book they were all talking about yesterday."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: Pythagorean, Eleatic, or Megarian systems, and 'the old quarrel of poetry
and philosophy' has at least a superficial reconcilement. (Rep.)
An unknown person who had heard of the discourses in praise of love spoken
by Socrates and others at the banquet of Agathon is desirous of having an
authentic account of them, which he thinks that he can obtain from
Apollodorus, the same excitable, or rather 'mad' friend of Socrates, who is
afterwards introduced in the Phaedo. He had imagined that the discourses
were recent. There he is mistaken: but they are still fresh in the memory
of his informant, who had just been repeating them to Glaucon, and is quite
prepared to have another rehearsal of them in a walk from the Piraeus to
Athens. Although he had not been present himself, he had heard them from
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