| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Melmoth Reconciled by Honore de Balzac: belonging to you, sir; I am twenty-two years of age, and I am in love
with Euphrasia--that is my story. My father is rich, he will pay you
back; do not ruin me! Have not you yourself been twenty-two years old
and madly in love?' But these beggarly landowners have no souls! He
would be quite likely to give me up to the public prosecutor, instead
of taking pity upon me. Good God! if it were only possible to sell
your soul to the Devil! But there is neither a God nor a Devil; it is
all nonsense out of nursery tales and old wives' talk. What shall I
do?"
"If you have a mind to sell your soul to the Devil, sir," said the
house-painter, who had overheard something that the clerk let fall,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad: keeping of the great wind, become part and parcel of the gale. The
olive hue of hurricane clouds presents an aspect peculiarly
appalling. The inky ragged wrack, flying before a nor'-west wind,
makes you dizzy with its headlong speed that depicts the rush of
the invisible air. A hard sou'-wester startles you with its close
horizon and its low gray sky, as if the world were a dungeon
wherein there is no rest for body or soul. And there are black
squalls, white squalls, thunder squalls, and unexpected gusts that
come without a single sign in the sky; and of each kind no one of
them resembles another.
There is infinite variety in the gales of wind at sea, and except
The Mirror of the Sea |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gorgias by Plato: closed eyes like brave men to let the physician operate with knife or
searing iron, not regarding the pain, in the hope of attaining the good and
the honourable; let him who has done things worthy of stripes, allow
himself to be scourged, if of bonds, to be bound, if of a fine, to be
fined, if of exile, to be exiled, if of death, to die, himself being the
first to accuse himself and his own relations, and using rhetoric to this
end, that his and their unjust actions may be made manifest, and that they
themselves may be delivered from injustice, which is the greatest evil.
Then, Polus, rhetoric would indeed be useful. Do you say 'Yes' or 'No' to
that?
POLUS: To me, Socrates, what you are saying appears very strange, though
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