| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Astoria by Washington Irving: A reconnoitring party was sent up the river to ascertain the
truth of the report. They ascended to the foot of the first
rapid, about two hundred miles, but could hear nothing of any
white men being in the neighborhood.
Not long after their return, however, further accounts were
received, by two wandering Indians, which established the fact
that the Northwest Company had actually erected a trading house
on the Spokane River, which falls into the north branch of the
Columbia.
What rendered this intelligence the more disquieting was the
inability of the Astorians, in their present reduced state as to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from La Grande Breteche by Honore de Balzac: children have made many holes in it. I learned later that this door
had been blocked for ten years. Through these irregular breaches you
will see that the side towards the courtyard is in perfect harmony
with the side towards the garden. The same ruin prevails. Tufts of
weeds outline the paving-stones; the walls are scored by enormous
cracks, and the blackened coping is laced with a thousand festoons of
pellitory. The stone steps are disjointed; the bell-cord is rotten;
the gutter-spouts broken. What fire from heaven could have fallen
there? By what decree has salt been sown on this dwelling? Has God
been mocked here? Or was France betrayed? These are the questions we
ask ourselves. Reptiles crawl over it, but give no reply. This empty
La Grande Breteche |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lesser Hippias by Plato: Hippias has been making? Why do you not either refute his words, if he
seems to you to have been wrong in any point, or join with us in commending
him? There is the more reason why you should speak, because we are now
alone, and the audience is confined to those who may fairly claim to take
part in a philosophical discussion.
SOCRATES: I should greatly like, Eudicus, to ask Hippias the meaning of
what he was saying just now about Homer. I have heard your father,
Apemantus, declare that the Iliad of Homer is a finer poem than the Odyssey
in the same degree that Achilles was a better man than Odysseus; Odysseus,
he would say, is the central figure of the one poem and Achilles of the
other. Now, I should like to know, if Hippias has no objection to tell me,
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