| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce: END, n. The position farthest removed on either hand from the
Interlocutor.
The man was perishing apace
Who played the tambourine;
The seal of death was on his face --
'Twas pallid, for 'twas clean.
"This is the end," the sick man said
In faint and failing tones.
A moment later he was dead,
And Tambourine was Bones.
Tinley Roquot
The Devil's Dictionary |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: praised. For in my simplicity I imagined that the topics of praise should
be true, and that this being presupposed, out of the true the speaker was
to choose the best and set them forth in the best manner. And I felt quite
proud, thinking that I knew the nature of true praise, and should speak
well. Whereas I now see that the intention was to attribute to Love every
species of greatness and glory, whether really belonging to him or not,
without regard to truth or falsehood--that was no matter; for the original
proposal seems to have been not that each of you should really praise Love,
but only that you should appear to praise him. And so you attribute to
Love every imaginable form of praise which can be gathered anywhere; and
you say that 'he is all this,' and 'the cause of all that,' making him
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Russia in 1919 by Arthur Ransome: sledges and motors had comparatively good roads, the
streets being certainly better swept and cleaned than they
have been since the last winter of the Russian Empire.
SMOLNI
Early in the morning I got tea, and a bread card on which I
was given a very small allowance of brown bread, noticeably
better in quality than the compound of clay and straw which
made me ill in Moscow last summer. Then I went to find
Litvinov, and set out with him to walk to the Smolni
institute, once a school for the daughters of the aristocracy,
then the headquarters of the Soviet, then the headquarters of
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