| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne: Bordeaux, we haven't enough to go with all steam from New York to Liverpool."
"I will consider," replied Mr. Fogg.
Passepartout understood it all; he was seized with mortal anxiety.
The coal was giving out! "Ah, if my master can get over that,"
muttered he, "he'll be a famous man!" He could not help imparting
to Fix what he had overheard.
"Then you believe that we really are going to Liverpool?"
"Of course."
"Ass!" replied the detective, shrugging his shoulders and turning on his heel.
Passepartout was on the point of vigorously resenting the epithet,
the reason of which he could not for the life of him comprehend;
Around the World in 80 Days |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Critias by Plato: of nature. The Critias is also connected with the Republic. Plato, as he
has already told us (Tim.), intended to represent the ideal state engaged
in a patriotic conflict. This mythical conflict is prophetic or symbolical
of the struggle of Athens and Persia, perhaps in some degree also of the
wars of the Greeks and Carthaginians, in the same way that the Persian is
prefigured by the Trojan war to the mind of Herodotus, or as the narrative
of the first part of the Aeneid is intended by Virgil to foreshadow the
wars of Carthage and Rome. The small number of the primitive Athenian
citizens (20,000), 'which is about their present number' (Crit.), is
evidently designed to contrast with the myriads and barbaric array of the
Atlantic hosts. The passing remark in the Timaeus that Athens was left
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Last War: A World Set Free by H. G. Wells: manifestly disposed to drag him towards the great door that
opened on the terrace. And Viard was hurrying towards the huge
windows and doing so in the strangest of attitudes, bent forward
and with eyes upturned.
Something up there?
And then it was as if thunder broke overhead.
The sound struck her like a blow. She crouched together against
the masonry and looked up. She saw three black shapes swooping
down through the torn clouds, and from a point a little below two
of them, there had already started curling trails of red....
Everything else in her being was paralysed, she hung through
The Last War: A World Set Free |
