| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The King of the Golden River by John Ruskin: too long in calm weather, as the wind, whistling round the old
house, carried it clear out from the wearer's shoulders to about
four times his own length.
Gluck was so perfectly paralyzed by the singular appearance of
his visitor that he remained fixed without uttering a word, until
the old gentleman, having performed another and a more energetic
concerto on the knocker, turned round to look after his flyaway
cloak. In so doing he caught sight of Gluck's little yellow head
jammed in the window, with its mouth and eyes very wide open indeed.
"Hollo!" said the little gentleman; "that's not the way to
answer the door. I'm wet; let me in."
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Elixir of Life by Honore de Balzac: prove to honest folk that Belvidero did not die in a duel with
stone, as some lithographers would have us believe.
When Don Juan Belvidero reached the age of sixty he settled in
Spain, and there in his old age he married a young and charming
Andalusian wife. But of set purpose he was neither a good husband
nor a good father. He had observed that we are never so tenderly
loved as by women to whom we scarcely give a thought. Dona Elvira
had been devoutly brought up by an old aunt in a castle a few
leagues from San-Lucar in a remote part of Andalusia. She was a
model of devotion and grace. Don Juan foresaw that this would be
a woman who would struggle long against a passion before
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: principle, and that some ideas combine with others, but not all with all.
It is remarkable however that he offers this obvious reply only as the
result of a long and tedious enquiry; by a great effort he is able to look
down as 'from a height' on the 'friends of the ideas' as well as on the
pre-Socratic philosophies. Yet he is merely asserting principles which no
one who could be made to understand them would deny.
The Platonic unity of differences or opposites is the beginning of the
modern view that all knowledge is of relations; it also anticipates the
doctrine of Spinoza that all determination is negation. Plato takes or
gives so much of either of these theories as was necessary or possible in
the age in which he lived. In the Sophist, as in the Cratylus, he is
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