| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell: information, crowds massed about the telegraph office and the depot
hoping for tidings, good tidings, for everyone hoped that the
silence of Sherman's cannon meant that the Yankees were in full
retreat and the Confederates chasing them back up the road to
Dalton. But no news came. The telegraph wires were still, no
trains came in on the one remaining railroad from the south and the
mail service was broken.
Autumn with its dusty, breathless heat was slipping in to choke the
suddenly quiet town, adding its dry, panting weight to tired,
anxious hearts. To Scarlett, mad to hear from Tara, yet trying to
keep up a brave face, it seemed an eternity since the siege began,
 Gone With the Wind |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Alcibiades II by Platonic Imitator: effect, and yet they are all diseases. May we not take an illustration
from the artizans?
ALCIBIADES: Certainly.
SOCRATES: There are cobblers and carpenters and sculptors and others of
all sorts and kinds, whom we need not stop to enumerate. All have their
distinct employments and all are workmen, although they are not all of them
cobblers or carpenters or sculptors.
ALCIBIADES: No, indeed.
SOCRATES: And in like manner men differ in regard to want of sense. Those
who are most out of their wits we call 'madmen,' while we term those who
are less far gone 'stupid' or 'idiotic,' or, if we prefer gentler language,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Deputy of Arcis by Honore de Balzac: queen, while Mademoiselle Chocardelle, first astonished and then
enlightened as to what it all meant, went off into fits of laughter,
took scarcely the time I have taken to tell it. Such, madame, was the
proceeding by which Madame Beauvisage, /nee/ Grevin, rescued her
husband; and though that proceeding may be called justifiable, it was
certainly injudicious, for before night the whole town had heard of
the catastrophe, and Beauvisage, arraigned and convicted by common
consent of deplorable immorality, saw fresh desertions taking place in
the already winnowed phalanx of his partisans.
However, the Gondreville and Grevin side still held firm, and--would
you believe it, madame?--it was again Mademoiselle Antonia to whom we
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