| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from An International Episode by Henry James: "I think it's tremendous," said Bessie Alden; and on
another occasion she asked him if he had any tenantry.
Hereupon it was that, as I have said, he was a little bored.
"Do you want to buy up their leases?" he asked.
"Well, have you got any livings?" she demanded.
"Oh, I say!" he cried. "Have you got a clergyman that is looking out?"
But she made him tell her that he had a castle; he confessed to but one.
It was the place in which he had been born and brought up, and, as he had
an old-time liking for it, he was beguiled into describing it a little
and saying it was really very jolly. Bessie Alden listened with great
interest and declared that she would give the world to see such a place.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: anything whatever which is done by art,--these all clearly come under the
head of doing?
Certainly.
And do you think that a state would be well ordered by a law which
compelled every man to weave and wash his own coat, and make his own shoes,
and his own flask and strigil, and other implements, on this principle of
every one doing and performing his own, and abstaining from what is not his
own?
I think not, he said.
But, I said, a temperate state will be a well-ordered state.
Of course, he replied.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Misalliance by George Bernard Shaw: here to kill you and then kill myself.
TARLETON. Begin with yourself, if you dont mind. Ive a good deal of
business to do still before I die. Havnt you?
THE MAN. No. Thats just it: Ive no business to do. Do you know
what my life is? I spend my days from nine to six--nine hours of
daylight and fresh air--in a stuffy little den counting another man's
money. Ive an intellect: a mind and a brain and a soul; and the use
he makes of them is to fix them on his tuppences and his
eighteenpences and his two pound seventeen and tenpences and see how
much they come to at the end of the day and take care that no one
steals them. I enter and enter, and add and add, and take money and
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