| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Alcibiades II by Platonic Imitator: house, were to enquire if he were at home, meaning to slay only him and no
one else:--the servants reply, 'Yes': (Mind, I do not mean that you would
really do such a thing; but there is nothing, you think, to prevent a man
who is ignorant of the best, having occasionally the whim that what is
worst is best?
ALCIBIADES: No.)
SOCRATES:--If, then, you went indoors, and seeing him, did not know him,
but thought that he was some one else, would you venture to slay him?
ALCIBIADES: Most decidedly not (it seems to me). (These words are omitted
in several MSS.)
SOCRATES: For you designed to kill, not the first who offered, but
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: promise to return to Villenoix, I did not go.
The sight of Louis had had some mysteriously sinister influence over
me. I was afraid to place myself again in that heavy atmosphere, where
ecstasy was contagious. Any man would have felt, as I did, a longing
to throw himself into the infinite, just as one soldier after another
killed himself in a certain sentry box where one had committed suicide
in the camp at Boulogne. It is a known fact that Napoleon was obliged
to have the hut burned which had harbored an idea that had become a
mortal infection.
Louis' room had perhaps the same fatal effect as that sentry box.
These two facts would then be additional evidence in favor of his
Louis Lambert |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Moral Emblems by Robert Louis Stevenson: The lonely bosom of the deep,
And daily the horizon scan
From Hatteras or Matapan.
Be sure, before that pirate's old,
He will have made a pot of gold,
And will retire from all his labours
And be respected by his neighbours.
YOU ALSO SCAN YOUR LIFE'S HORIZON
FOR ALL THAT YOU CAN CLAP YOUR EYES ON.
A MARTIAL ELEGY FOR SOME LEAD SOLDIERS
For certain soldiers lately dead
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