| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: word (Greek), or temperance. From the ethical notion of temperance, which
is variously defined to be quietness, modesty, doing our own business, the
doing of good actions, the dialogue passes onto the intellectual conception
of (Greek), which is declared also to be the science of self-knowledge, or
of the knowledge of what we know and do not know, or of the knowledge of
good and evil. The dialogue represents a stage in the history of
philosophy in which knowledge and action were not yet distinguished. Hence
the confusion between them, and the easy transition from one to the other.
The definitions which are offered are all rejected, but it is to be
observed that they all tend to throw a light on the nature of temperance,
and that, unlike the distinction of Critias between (Greek), none of them
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from In a German Pension by Katherine Mansfield: morning until late at night. At five o'clock she tumbled out of bed,
buttoned on her clothes, wearing a long-sleeved alpaca pinafore over her
black frock, and groped her way downstairs into the kitchen.
Anna, the cook, had grown so fat during the summer that she adored her bed
because she did not have to wear her corsets there, but could spread as
much as she liked, roll about under the great mattress, calling upon Jesus
and Holy Mary and Blessed Anthony himself that her life was not fit for a
pig in a cellar.
Sabina was new to her work. Pink colour still flew in her cheeks; there
was a little dimple on the left side of her mouth that even when she was
most serious, most absorbed, popped out and gave her away. And Anna
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy: to his work. Whenever he felt reconciled to his fate as a student,
there came to disturb his calm his hopeless relations with Sue.
That the one affined soul he had ever met was lost to him through his
marriage returned upon him with cruel persistency, till, unable to bear
it longer, he again rushed for distraction to the real Christminster life.
He now sought it out in an obscure and low-ceiled tavern up a court
which was well known to certain worthies of the place, and in brighter
times would have interested him simply by its quaintness. Here he sat more
or less all the day, convinced that he was at bottom a vicious character,
of whom it was hopeless to expect anything.
In the evening the frequenters of the house dropped in one by one,
Jude the Obscure |
