| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy: house to see more of the Daemonic Sabbath than they could
see within.
At last Farfrae's man, who had been agape on the door-
step, came up; then the cook. The shutters, hastily
pushed to by Elizabeth, were quite closed, a light was
obtained, Lucetta carried to her room, and the man sent off
for a doctor. While Elizabeth was undressing her she
recovered consciousness; but as soon as she remembered what
had passed the fit returned.
The doctor arrived with unhoped-for promptitude; he had been
standing at his door, like others, wondering what the uproar
 The Mayor of Casterbridge |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Apology by Xenophon: moderate drinker has become a wine-bibber and a drunkard; from being a
lover of healthy honest toil has become effeminate, or under the
thrall of some other wicked pleasure."
[28] Lit. "whom do you know," and so throughout.
[29] Cf. Plat. "Phaed." 66 C.
[30] Or, "so attempered and adjusted." The phrase savours of "cynic."
theory.
[31] Or, "present no temptation to him"; lit. "that he stands in no
further need of what belongs to his neighbours."
[32] {ta legomena}, "the meaning of words and the force of argument."
[33] {ek panton}. Cf. Thuc. i. 120, {osper kai en allois ek panton
 The Apology |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Taras Bulba and Other Tales by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: with the professor that the secrets of the old masters are
irremediably lost to us. It seemed to him that the nineteenth century
had improved upon them considerably, that the delineation of nature
was more clear, more vivid, more close. It sometimes vexed him when he
saw how a strange artist, French or German, sometimes not even a
painter by profession, but only a skilful dauber, produced, by the
celerity of his brush and the vividness of his colouring, a universal
commotion, and amassed in a twinkling a funded capital. This did not
occur to him when fully occupied with his own work, for then he forgot
food and drink and all the world. But when dire want arrived, when he
had no money wherewith to buy brushes and colours, when his implacable
 Taras Bulba and Other Tales |