| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Z. Marcas by Honore de Balzac: his daily bread, but he had neither linen, clothes, nor shoes. He did
not make himself out any better than he was; his dreams had been of
luxury as well as of power. He did not admit that this was the real
Marcas; he abandoned this person, indeed, to the caprices of life.
What he lived by was the breath of ambition; he dreamed of revenge
while blaming himself for yielding to so shallow a feeling. The true
statesman ought, above all things, to be superior to vulgar passions;
like the man of science. It was in these days of dire necessity that
Marcas seemed to us so great--nay, so terrible; there was something
awful in the gaze which saw another world than that which strikes the
eye of ordinary men. To us he was a subject of contemplation and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: the name of the latter indicates his savage, man-of-the-mountain nature.
Atreus again, for his murder of Chrysippus, and his cruelty to Thyestes, is
rightly named Atreus, which, to the eye of the etymologist, is ateros
(destructive), ateires (stubborn), atreotos (fearless); and Pelops is o ta
pelas oron (he who sees what is near only), because in his eagerness to win
Hippodamia, he was unconscious of the remoter consequences which the murder
of Myrtilus would entail upon his race. The name Tantalus, if slightly
changed, offers two etymologies; either apo tes tou lithou talanteias, or
apo tou talantaton einai, signifying at once the hanging of the stone over
his head in the world below, and the misery which he brought upon his
country. And the name of his father, Zeus, Dios, Zenos, has an excellent
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: anticipates the excuse which Socrates was to have made on Aristodemus'
behalf for coming uninvited; (3) how the story of the fit or trance of
Socrates is confirmed by the mention which Alcibiades makes of a similar
fit of abstraction occurring when he was serving with the army at Potidaea;
like (4) the drinking powers of Socrates and his love of the fair, which
receive a similar attestation in the concluding scene; or the attachment of
Aristodemus, who is not forgotten when Socrates takes his departure. (5)
We may notice the manner in which Socrates himself regards the first five
speeches, not as true, but as fanciful and exaggerated encomiums of the god
Love; (6) the satirical character of them, shown especially in the appeals
to mythology, in the reasons which are given by Zeus for reconstructing the
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