| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Laches by Plato: the art of which we want to find the masters?
MELESIAS: I do not understand.
SOCRATES: Let me try to make my meaning plainer then. I do not think that
we have as yet decided what that is about which we are consulting, when we
ask which of us is or is not skilled in the art, and has or has not had a
teacher of the art.
NICIAS: Why, Socrates, is not the question whether young men ought or
ought not to learn the art of fighting in armour?
SOCRATES: Yes, Nicias; but there is also a prior question, which I may
illustrate in this way: When a person considers about applying a medicine
to the eyes, would you say that he is consulting about the medicine or
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: Imagination can figure nothing so grand, so surprising, and so
astonishing! it looked as if ten thousand flashes of lightning
were darting at the same time from every quarter of the sky.
I was curious to know how this prince, to whose dominions there
is no access from any other country, came to think of armies, or
to teach his people the practice of military discipline. But I
was soon informed, both by conversation and reading their
histories; for, in the course of many ages, they have been
troubled with the same disease to which the whole race of mankind
is subject; the nobility often contending for power, the people
for liberty, and the king for absolute dominion. All which,
Gulliver's Travels |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from New Arabian Nights by Robert Louis Stevenson: way. If, when I return, I find you here no longer, I shall follow
at once to the Black Head."
And he set out to find the Maire's. It took him some ten minutes
wandering among blind lanes, and when he arrived it was already
half-an-hour past midnight. A long white garden wall overhung by
some thick chestnuts, a door with a letter-box, and an iron bell-
pull, that was all that could be seen of the Maire's domicile.
Leon took the bell-pull in both hands, and danced furiously upon
the side-walk. The bell itself was just upon the other side of the
wall, it responded to his activity, and scattered an alarming
clangour far and wide into the night.
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