| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: learned from Hesiod, who says that 'work is no disgrace.' Now do you
imagine that if he had meant by working and doing such things as you were
describing, he would have said that there was no disgrace in them--for
example, in the manufacture of shoes, or in selling pickles, or sitting for
hire in a house of ill-fame? That, Socrates, is not to be supposed: but I
conceive him to have distinguished making from doing and work; and, while
admitting that the making anything might sometimes become a disgrace, when
the employment was not honourable, to have thought that work was never any
disgrace at all. For things nobly and usefully made he called works; and
such makings he called workings, and doings; and he must be supposed to
have called such things only man's proper business, and what is hurtful,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Faith of Men by Jack London: comes into the faces of men when they yearn vainly for the things
they have been long denied. This same wistfulness was in
Pentfield's face, and the groan of it was articulate in the heave
of his shoulders.
"I dreamed last night I was in Zinkand's," he said. "The music
playing, glasses clinking, voices humming, women laughing, and I
was ordering eggs--yes, sir, eggs, fried and boiled and poached and
scrambled, and in all sorts of ways, and downing them as fast as
they arrived."
"I'd have ordered salads and green things," Hutchinson criticized
hungrily, "with a big, rare, Porterhouse, and young onions and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Message by Honore de Balzac: buried herself deep in the hay, hiding her face in it to deaden
those dreadful cries--pudency even stronger than grief. She was
sobbing and crying like a child, but there was a more poignant,
more piteous sound in the sobs. There was nothing left in the
world for her. The maid pulled the hay from her, her mistress
submitting with the supine listlessness of a dying animal. The
maid could find nothing to say but "There! madame; there,
there----"
"What is the matter with her? What is it, niece?" the old canon
kept on exclaiming.
At last, with the girl's help, I carried Juliette to her room,
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