| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A House of Pomegranates by Oscar Wilde: and down on the highways, and their wallets are empty. Through the
streets of the cities walks Famine, and the Plague sits at their
gates. Come, let us go forth and mend these things, and make them
not to be. Wherefore shouldst thou tarry here calling to thy love,
seeing she comes not to thy call? And what is love, that thou
shouldst set this high store upon it?'
But the young Fisherman answered it nought, so great was the power
of his love. And every morning he called to the Mermaid, and every
noon he called to her again, and at night-time he spake her name.
Yet never did she rise out of the sea to meet him, nor in any place
of the sea could he find her, though he sought for her in the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Alcibiades I by Plato: know the belongings of our belongings?
ALCIBIADES: Clearly not.
SOCRATES: Then we were not altogether right in acknowledging just now that
a man may know what belongs to him and yet not know himself; nay, rather he
cannot even know the belongings of his belongings; for the discernment of
the things of self, and of the things which belong to the things of self,
appear all to be the business of the same man, and of the same art.
ALCIBIADES: So much may be supposed.
SOCRATES: And he who knows not the things which belong to himself, will in
like manner be ignorant of the things which belong to others?
ALCIBIADES: Very true.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gambara by Honore de Balzac: Earlier, he might have been detected; later, he might find himself cut
out. Tempted by a glance which is encouraging without being inviting,
to have followed a young and pretty woman for an hour, or perhaps for
a day, thinking of her as a divinity and excusing her light conduct by
a thousand reasons to her advantage; to have allowed oneself to
believe in a sudden and irresistible affinity; to have pictured, under
the promptings of transient excitement, a love-adventure in an age
when romances are written precisely because they never happen; to have
dreamed of balconies, guitars, stratagems, and bolts, enwrapped in
Almaviva's cloak; and, after inditing a poem in fancy, to stop at the
door of a house of ill-fame, and, crowning all, to discern in Rosina's
Gambara |
