| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Dracula by Bram Stoker: for you trust, and trust cannot be where there is mean nature.
And your husband, tell me of him. Is he quite well?
Is all that fever gone, and is he strong and hearty?"
I saw here an opening to ask him about Jonathan, so I said,
"He was almost recovered, but he has been greatly upset
by Mr. Hawkins death."
He interrupted, "Oh, yes. I know. I know. I have read
your last two letters."
I went on, "I suppose this upset him, for when we were in town on Thursday
last he had a sort of shock."
"A shock, and after brain fever so soon! That is not good.
Dracula |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: which the seamen call to windward, that the scent of the bodies might
blow from them; and thus great numbers went out of the world who
were never known, or any account of them taken, as well within the
bills of mortality as without.
This, indeed, I had in the main only from the relation of others, for I
seldom walked into the fields, except towards Bethnal Green and
Hackney, or as hereafter. But when I did walk, I always saw a great
many poor wanderers at a distance; but I could know little of their
cases, for whether it were in the street or in the fields, if we had seen
anybody coming, it was a general method to walk away; yet I believe
the account is exactly true.
A Journal of the Plague Year |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: representation of ordinary French life. And the greater part of Greek
literature, beginning with Homer and including the tragedians,
philosophers, and, with the exception of the Comic poets (whose business
was to raise a laugh by whatever means), all the greater writers of Hellas
who have been preserved to us, are free from the taint of indecency.
Some general considerations occur to our mind when we begin to reflect on
this subject. (1) That good and evil are linked together in human nature,
and have often existed side by side in the world and in man to an extent
hardly credible. We cannot distinguish them, and are therefore unable to
part them; as in the parable 'they grow together unto the harvest:' it is
only a rule of external decency by which society can divide them. Nor
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