| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Poems of Goethe, Bowring, Tr. by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Her beloved spouse to follow,
And his dear and only mother
Through the sword her faithful son."
"Stay! oh stay!" exclaim'd the father:
"Yet 'tis time, so hasten, hasten!
Join the head upon the body,
With the sword then touch the figure,
And, alive she'll follow thee."
Hastening, he, with breathless wonder,
Sees the bodies of two women
Lying crosswise, and their heads too;
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Before Adam by Jack London: carnivorous beasts.
But Lop-Ear and I strayed over to the hills one day.
We would not have strayed had we not been teasing a
tiger. Please do not laugh. It was old Saber-Tooth
himself. We were perfectly safe. We chanced upon him
in the forest, early in the morning, and from the
safety of the branches overhead we chattered down at
him our dislike and hatred. And from branch to branch,
and from tree to tree, we followed overhead, making an
infernal row and warning all the forest-dwellers that
old Saber-Tooth was coming.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: comedy we laugh at the conceit or weakness of others. He has certainly
given a very partial explanation of the ridiculous.) Having shown how
sorrow, anger, envy are feelings of a mixed nature, I will reserve the
consideration of the remainder for another occasion.
Next follow the unmixed pleasures; which, unlike the philosophers of whom I
was speaking, I believe to be real. These unmixed pleasures are: (1) The
pleasures derived from beauty of form, colour, sound, smell, which are
absolutely pure; and in general those which are unalloyed with pain: (2)
The pleasures derived from the acquisition of knowledge, which in
themselves are pure, but may be attended by an accidental pain of
forgetting; this, however, arises from a subsequent act of reflection, of
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