| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Cousin Pons by Honore de Balzac: "She has perverted you," moaned Pons.
Mme. Cibot had taken up her station behind the bed to make signals
unobserved. Pons thought that she had left the room. "She is murdering
me," he added.
"What is that? I am murdering you, am I?" cried La Cibot, suddenly
appearing, hand on hips and eyes aflame. "I am as faithful as a dog,
and this is all I get! God Almighty!--"
She burst into tears and dropped down into the great chair, a tragical
movement which wrought a most disastrous revulsion in Pons.
"Very good," she said, rising to her feet. The woman's malignant eyes
looked poison and bullets at the two friends. "Very good. Nothing that
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: other. Plato and Aristotle do not dovetail into one another; nor does the
one begin where the other ends; there is a gulf between them not to be
measured by time, which in the fragmentary state of our knowledge it is
impossible to bridge over. It follows that the one cannot be interpreted
by the other. At any rate, it is not Plato who is to be interpreted by
Aristotle, but Aristotle by Plato. Of all philosophy and of all art the
true understanding is to be sought not in the afterthoughts of posterity,
but in the elements out of which they have arisen. For the previous stage
is a tendency towards the ideal at which they are aiming; the later is a
declination or deviation from them, or even a perversion of them. No man's
thoughts were ever so well expressed by his disciples as by himself.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Roads of Destiny by O. Henry: am disposed to shirk a duty. You know that bird, Monsieur Mignot; he
is the philosopher of the air. He is happy through submission to his
lot. None so merry or full-crawed as he with his whimsical eye and
rollicking step. The fields yield him what he desires. He never
grieves that his plumage is not gay, like the oriole's. And you have
heard, Monsieur Mignot, the notes that nature has given him? Is the
nightingale any happier, do you think?"
David rose to his feet. The crow cawed harshly from his tree.
"I thank you, Monsieur Bril," he said, slowly. "There was not, then,
one nightingale among all those croaks?"
"I could not have missed it," said Monsieur Bril, with a sigh. "I read
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