| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Alcibiades II by Platonic Imitator: SOCRATES: And there cannot be two opposites to one thing?
ALCIBIADES: There cannot.
SOCRATES: Then madness and want of sense are the same?
ALCIBIADES: That appears to be the case.
SOCRATES: We shall be in the right, therefore, Alcibiades, if we say that
all who are senseless are mad. For example, if among persons of your own
age or older than yourself there are some who are senseless,--as there
certainly are,--they are mad. For tell me, by heaven, do you not think
that in the city the wise are few, while the foolish, whom you call mad,
are many?
ALCIBIADES: I do.
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Garden Party by Katherine Mansfield: "Now, if we were to cut him open here, Mrs. Parker," said the doctor,
"you'd find his lungs chock-a-block with white powder. Breathe, my good
fellow!" And Mrs. Parker never knew for certain whether she saw or whether
she fancied she saw a great fan of white dust come out of her poor dead
husband's lips...
But the struggle she'd had to bring up those six little children and keep
herself to herself. Terrible it had been! Then, just when they were old
enough to go to school her husband's sister came to stop with them to help
things along, and she hadn't been there more than two months when she fell
down a flight of steps and hurt her spine. And for five years Ma Parker
had another baby--and such a one for crying!--to look after. Then young
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass: wretched condition. Everything in the way of kindness, which I
had experienced at Baltimore; all my former hopes and aspirations
for usefulness in the world, and the happy moments spent in the
exercises of religion, contrasted with my then present lot, but
increased my anguish.
I suffered bodily as well as mentally. I had neither sufficient
time in which to eat or to sleep, except on Sundays. The
overwork, and the brutal chastisements of which I was the victim,
combined with that ever-gnawing and soul-devouring thought--"_I
am a slave--a slave for life--a slave with no rational ground to
hope for freedom_"--rendered me a living embodiment of mental and
 My Bondage and My Freedom |