| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: two centuries by a process of antagonism and negation the leading thoughts
of philosophy were evolved.
There is nothing like this progress of opposites in Plato, who in the
Symposium denies the possibility of reconciliation until the opposition has
passed away. In his own words, there is an absurdity in supposing that
'harmony is discord; for in reality harmony consists of notes of a higher
and lower pitch which disagreed once, but are now reconciled by the art of
music' (Symp.). He does indeed describe objects of sense as regarded by us
sometimes from one point of view and sometimes from another. As he says at
the end of the Fifth Book of the Republic, 'There is nothing light which is
not heavy, or great which is not small.' And he extends this relativity to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad: human. At one time they must have been full of good old slow West
Indiamen of the square-stern type, that took their captivity, one
imagines, as stolidly as they had faced the buffeting of the waves
with their blunt, honest bows, and disgorged sugar, rum, molasses,
coffee, or logwood sedately with their own winch and tackle. But
when I knew them, of exports there was never a sign that one could
detect; and all the imports I have ever seen were some rare cargoes
of tropical timber, enormous baulks roughed out of iron trunks
grown in the woods about the Gulf of Mexico. They lay piled up in
stacks of mighty boles, and it was hard to believe that all this
mass of dead and stripped trees had come out of the flanks of a
The Mirror of the Sea |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Under the Red Robe by Stanley Weyman: was a foot wide. He had a little jewel in one ear, and his tiny
beard was peaked A L'ESPAGNOLE. Probably when he turned he
expected to see the sergeant, for at the sight of me he rose
slowly, leaving the dice still covered.
'What folly is this?' he cried, wrathfully. Here, sergeant!
Sergeant!--without there! What the--! Who are you, sir?'
'Captain Larolle,' I said uncovering politely, 'I believe?'
'Yes, I am Captain Larolle,' he retorted. 'But who, in the
fiend's name, are you?' You are not the man we are after!'
'I am not M. Cocheforet,' I said coolly. 'I am merely a guest in
the house, M. le Capitaine. I have been enjoying Madame de
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