| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: wishes known. In 1837 the legislature passed a set of resolutions
"highly disapproving abolition societies." Lincoln and five
others voted against it; but, not content with this, Lincoln also
drew up a paper protesting against the passage of such a
resolution and stating his views on slavery. They were not
extreme views. Though declaring slavery to be an evil, he did not
insist that the black people ought to be set free. But so strong
was the popular feeling against anything approaching
"abolitionism" that only one man out of the five who voted
against the resolution had the courage to sign this protest with
him. Lincoln was young, poor, and in need of all the good-will at
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner--young clerks
in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.
Again at eight o'clock, when the dark lanes of the Forties were five
deep with throbbing taxi-cabs, bound for the theatre district, I felt a
sinking in my heart. Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited,
and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted
cigarettes outlined unintelligible 70 gestures inside. Imagining that
I, too, was hurrying toward gayety and sharing their intimate
excitement, I wished them well.
For a while I lost sight of Jordan Baker, and then in midsummer I found
her again. At first I was flattered to go places with her, because she
The Great Gatsby |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Crito by Plato: glorious death the good which he might still be able to perform. 'A
rhetorician would have had much to say upon that point.' It may be
observed however that Plato never intended to answer the question of
casuistry, but only to exhibit the ideal of patient virtue which refuses to
do the least evil in order to avoid the greatest, and to show his master
maintaining in death the opinions which he had professed in his life. Not
'the world,' but the 'one wise man,' is still the paradox of Socrates in
his last hours. He must be guided by reason, although her conclusions may
be fatal to him. The remarkable sentiment that the wicked can do neither
good nor evil is true, if taken in the sense, which he means, of moral
evil; in his own words, 'they cannot make a man wise or foolish.'
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