| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: always be right; but he who has right opinion will sometimes be right, and
sometimes not.
SOCRATES: What do you mean? Can he be wrong who has right opinion, so
long as he has right opinion?
MENO: I admit the cogency of your argument, and therefore, Socrates, I
wonder that knowledge should be preferred to right opinion--or why they
should ever differ.
SOCRATES: And shall I explain this wonder to you?
MENO: Do tell me.
SOCRATES: You would not wonder if you had ever observed the images of
Daedalus (Compare Euthyphro); but perhaps you have not got them in your
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: the essence of his position - sightless, and his only recourse then
was in abrupt turns, rapid recoveries of ground. He wheeled about,
retracing his steps, as if he might so catch in his face at least
the stirred air of some other quick revolution. It was indeed true
that his fully dislocalised thought of these manoeuvres recalled to
him Pantaloon, at the Christmas farce, buffeted and tricked from
behind by ubiquitous Harlequin; but it left intact the influence of
the conditions themselves each time he was re-exposed to them, so
that in fact this association, had he suffered it to become
constant, would on a certain side have but ministered to his
intenser gravity. He had made, as I have said, to create on the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Merry Men by Robert Louis Stevenson: crazy, and from thenceforward, till the day he died, said only one
form of words; what they were in the original Gaelic I cannot tell,
but they were thus translated: 'Ah, the sweet singing out of the
sea.' Seals that haunted on that coast have been known to speak to
man in his own tongue, presaging great disasters. It was here that
a certain saint first landed on his voyage out of Ireland to
convert the Hebrideans. And, indeed, I think he had some claim to
be called saint; for, with the boats of that past age, to make so
rough a passage, and land on such a ticklish coast, was surely not
far short of the miraculous. It was to him, or to some of his
monkish underlings who had a cell there, that the islet owes its
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