| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: to be wiser than the so-called overseers of the poor and selectmen
of the town, and thought it was time that the tables were turned.
With respect to wit, I learned that there was not much difference
between the half and the whole. One day, in particular, an
inoffensive, simple-minded pauper, whom with others I had often seen
used as fencing stuff, standing or sitting on a bushel in the fields
to keep cattle and himself from straying, visited me, and expressed
a wish to live as I did. He told me, with the utmost simplicity and
truth, quite superior, or rather inferior, to anything that is
called humility, that he was "deficient in intellect." These were
his words. The Lord had made him so, yet he supposed the Lord cared
Walden |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lesser Hippias by Plato: represented by Homer in many passages both of the Iliad and Odyssey.
SOCRATES: And Homer must be presumed to have meant that the true man is
not the same as the false?
HIPPIAS: Of course, Socrates.
SOCRATES: And is that your own opinion, Hippias?
HIPPIAS: Certainly; how can I have any other?
SOCRATES: Well, then, as there is no possibility of asking Homer what he
meant in these verses of his, let us leave him; but as you show a
willingness to take up his cause, and your opinion agrees with what you
declare to be his, will you answer on behalf of yourself and him?
HIPPIAS: I will; ask shortly anything which you like.
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Beauty and The Beast by Bayard Taylor: from her seat but for the support of the partition against
which she leaned. Fortunately, the women near her were too much
occupied with the narrative to notice her condition. Many of them
wept silently, with their handkerchiefs pressed over their mouths.
The first shock of death-like faintness passed away, and she clung
to the speaker's voice, as if its sound alone could give her
strength to sit still and listen further.
"Deserted by his friends, unable to stay his feet on the evil
path," he continued, "the young man left his home and went to a
city in another State. But here it was easier to find associates
in evil than tender hearts that might help him back to good. He
|
