| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Alkahest by Honore de Balzac: Women have presentiments whose accuracy is often marvellous. Why do
they fear so much more than they hope in matters that concern the
interests of this life? Why is their faith given only to religious
ideas of a future existence? Why do they so ably foresee the
catastrophes of fortune and the crises of fate? Perhaps the sentiment
which unites them to the men they love gives them a sense by which
they weigh force, measure faculties, understand tastes, passions,
vices, virtues. The perpetual study of these causes in the midst of
which they live gives them, no doubt, the fatal power of foreseeing
effects in all possible relations of earthly life. What they see of
the present enables them to judge of the future with an intuitive
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lesser Hippias by Plato: HIPPIAS: Certainly not, Socrates; what makes you say so?
SOCRATES: Because you say that Achilles does not speak falsely from
design, when he is not only a deceiver, but besides being a braggart, in
Homer's description of him is so cunning, and so far superior to Odysseus
in lying and pretending, that he dares to contradict himself, and Odysseus
does not find him out; at any rate he does not appear to say anything to
him which would imply that he perceived his falsehood.
HIPPIAS: What do you mean, Socrates?
SOCRATES: Did you not observe that afterwards, when he is speaking to
Odysseus, he says that he will sail away with the early dawn; but to Ajax
he tells quite a different story?
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The People That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs: sound of padded feet moving stealthily in my direction.
I believe that never before in all my life, even amidst the
terrors of childhood nights, have I suffered such a sensation
of extreme horror as I did that moment in which I realized that
I must lie bound and helpless while some horrid beast of prey
crept upon me to devour me in that utter darkness of the Bandlu
pits of Caspak. I reeked with cold sweat, and my flesh
crawled--I could feel it crawl. If ever I came nearer to
abject cowardice, I do not recall the instance; and yet it was
not that I was afraid to die, for I had long since given myself
up as lost--a few days of Caspak must impress anyone with the
The People That Time Forgot |
