| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The King of the Golden River by John Ruskin: mug to look at. The handle was formed of two wreaths of flowing
golden hair, so finely spun that it looked more like silk than
metal, and these wreaths descended into and mixed with a beard and
whiskers of the same exquisite workmanship, which surrounded and
decorated a very fierce little face, of the reddest gold imaginable,
right in the front of the mug, with a pair of eyes in it which
seemed to command its whole circumference. It was impossible to
drink out of the mug without being subjected to an intense gaze out
of the side of these eyes, and Schwartz positively averred that
once, after emptying it, full of Rhenish, seventeen times, he had
seen them wink! When it came to the mug's turn to be made into
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy: everything. He had been on a railway, had been a land-steward,
and had started factories, and he talked, quite without
necessity, of all he had done, and used learned expressions quite
inappropriately.
The third, the artilleryman, on the contrary, struck Katavasov
very favorably. He was a quiet, modest fellow, unmistakably
impressed by the knowledge of the officer and the heroic
self-sacrifice of the merchant and saying nothing about himself.
When Katavasov asked him what had impelled him to go to Servia,
he answered modestly:
"Oh, well, every one's going. The Servians want help, too. I'm
Anna Karenina |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: any good purpose must follow; but under the circumstances, as men say, we
must do as well as we can. What do you think?
HERMOGENES: I very much approve.
SOCRATES: That objects should be imitated in letters and syllables, and so
find expression, may appear ridiculous, Hermogenes, but it cannot be
avoided--there is no better principle to which we can look for the truth of
first names. Deprived of this, we must have recourse to divine help, like
the tragic poets, who in any perplexity have their gods waiting in the air;
and must get out of our difficulty in like fashion, by saying that 'the
Gods gave the first names, and therefore they are right.' This will be the
best contrivance, or perhaps that other notion may be even better still, of
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