| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Marriage Contract by Honore de Balzac: when the sailors began to weigh anchor, Paul noticed that Mathias was
making signals to him with his handkerchief. The old housekeeper had
hurried to her master, who seemed to be excited by some sudden event.
Paul asked the captain to wait a moment, and send a boat to the pier,
which was done. Too feeble himself to go aboard, Mathias gave two
letters to a sailor in the boat.
"My friend," he said, "this packet" (showing one of the two letters)
"is important; it has just arrived by a courier from Paris in thirty-
five hours. State this to Monsieur le comte; don't neglect to do so;
it may change his plans."
"Would he come ashore?"
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from 1984 by George Orwell: the belfry of a ruinous church in an almost-deserted stretch of country
where an atomic bomb had fallen thirty years earlier. It was a good
hiding-place when once you got there, but the getting there was very
dangerous. For the rest they could meet only in the streets, in a different
place every evening and never for more than half an hour at a time. In the
street it was usually possible to talk, after a fashion. As they drifted
down the crowded pavements, not quite abreast and never looking at one
another, they carried on a curious, intermittent conversation which flicked
on and off like the beams of a lighthouse, suddenly nipped into silence
by the approach of a Party uniform or the proximity of a telescreen, then
taken up again minutes later in the middle of a sentence, then abruptly
1984 |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Statesman by Plato: who were naturally inclined to believe that the fortunes of mankind are
influenced by the stars, or who maintained that some one principle, like
the principle of the Same and the Other in the Timaeus, pervades all things
in the world, the reversal of the motion of the heavens seemed necessarily
to produce a reversal of the order of human life. The spheres of
knowledge, which to us appear wide asunder as the poles, astronomy and
medicine, were naturally connected in the minds of early thinkers, because
there was little or nothing in the space between them. Thus there is a
basis of philosophy, on which the improbabilities of the tale may be said
to rest. These are some of the devices by which Plato, like a modern
novelist, seeks to familiarize the marvellous.
Statesman |
