| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Firm of Nucingen by Honore de Balzac: loved her so blindly that the whole household rejoiced over a
circumstance that enabled them to hide the dolorous spectacle of the
funeral from the sorrowing Baroness. Isaure and Malvina would not
allow their idolized mother to see their tears.
"While the Requiem was chanted, they diverted her thoughts to the
choice of mourning dresses. While the coffin was placed in the huge,
black and white, wax-besprinkled catafalque that does duty for some
three thousand dead in the course of its career--so I was informed by
a philosophically-minded mute whom I once consulted on a point over a
couple of glasses of petit blanc--while an indifferent priest mumbling
the office for the dead, do you know what the friends of the departed
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from King Lear by William Shakespeare: by
their eyes but blind men, and there's not a nose among
twenty
but can smell him that's stinking. Let go thy hold when a
great
wheel runs down a hill, lest it break thy neck with
following
it; but the great one that goes upward, let him draw thee
after.
When a wise man gives thee better counsel, give me mine
again. I
King Lear |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Apology by Xenophon: at Delhi concerning me, and Apollo answered that there was no human
being more liberal, or more upright, or more temperate than myself."
And when once more on hearing these words the judges gave vent, as was
only natural, to a fiercer murmur of dissent, Socrates once again
spoke: "Yet, sirs, they were still greater words which the god spake
in oracle concerning Lycurgus,[26] the great lawgiver of Lacedaemon,
than those concerning me. It is said that as he entered the temple the
god addressed him with the words: 'I am considering whether to call
thee god or man.' Me he likened not indeed to a god, but in
excellence[27] preferred me far beyond other men."
[25] L. Dindorf cf. Athen. v. 218 E; Hermesianax ap. Athen. xiii. 599
The Apology |
