| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Lysis by Plato: Ctesippus. And there is Ctesippus himself: do you see him?
Never mind, Socrates, you shall argue with him.
Well, I suppose that I must, I replied.
Hereupon Ctesippus complained that we were talking in secret, and keeping
the feast to ourselves.
I shall be happy, I said, to let you have a share. Here is Lysis, who does
not understand something that I was saying, and wants me to ask Menexenus,
who, as he thinks, is likely to know.
And why do you not ask him? he said.
Very well, I said, I will; and do you, Menexenus, answer. But first I must
tell you that I am one who from my childhood upward have set my heart upon
Lysis |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Middlemarch by George Eliot: I don't feel sure about doing good in any way now: everything
seems like going on a mission to a people whose language I don't
know;--unless it were building good cottages--there can be no
doubt about that. Oh, I hope I should be able to get the people
well housed in Lowick! I will draw plenty of plans while I have time."
Dorothea checked herself suddenly with self-rebuke for the
presumptuous way in which she was reckoning on uncertain events,
but she was spared any inward effort to change the direction of her
thoughts by the appearance of a cantering horseman round a turning
of the road. The well-groomed chestnut horse and two beautiful
setters could leave no doubt that the rider was Sir James Chettam.
Middlemarch |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Two Poets by Honore de Balzac: drawn.
"Lucien told me that your father, with the intuition of a man of
talent, had a glimmering of a notion of some way of replacing linen
rags with an exceedingly common vegetable product, not previously
manufactured, but taken direct from the soil, as the Chinese use
vegetable fibre at first hand. I have classified the guesses made by
those who came before me, and have begun to study the question. The
bamboo is a kind of reed; naturally I began to think of the reeds that
grow here in France.
"Labor is very cheap in China, where a workman earns three halfpence a
day, and this cheapness of labor enables the Chinese to manipulate
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