| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Gorgias by Plato: POLUS: Certainly.
SOCRATES: And I affirm that he is most miserable, and that those who are
punished are less miserable--are you going to refute this proposition also?
POLUS: A proposition which is harder of refutation than the other,
Socrates.
SOCRATES: Say rather, Polus, impossible; for who can refute the truth?
POLUS: What do you mean? If a man is detected in an unjust attempt to
make himself a tyrant, and when detected is racked, mutilated, has his eyes
burned out, and after having had all sorts of great injuries inflicted on
him, and having seen his wife and children suffer the like, is at last
impaled or tarred and burned alive, will he be happier than if he escape
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau by Honore de Balzac: lie in wait for their tidal chances. When Roguin first confided his
troubles to du Tillet, the latter had vaguely foreseen the possibility
of destroying Cesar, and he was not mistaken. Forced at last to give
up his mistress, the notary drank the dregs of his philter from a
broken chalice. He went every day to the Champs Elysees returning home
early in the morning. The suspicions of Madame Cesar were justified.
*****
From the moment when a man consents to play the part which du Tillet
had allotted to Roguin, he develops the talents of a comedian; he has
the eye of a lynx and the penetration of a seer; he magnetizes his
dupe. The notary had seen Birotteau some time before Birotteau had
Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Captain Stormfield by Mark Twain: heaven you belong to, but you won't be conspicuous in this section
without it."
I felt all right, if that was the case, so I bade him good-day and
left. All day I walked towards the far end of a prodigious hall of
the office, hoping to come out into heaven any moment, but it was a
mistake. That hall was built on the general heavenly plan - it
naturally couldn't be small. At last I got so tired I couldn't go
any farther; so I sat down to rest, and begun to tackle the
queerest sort of strangers and ask for information, but I didn't
get any; they couldn't understand my language, and I could not
understand theirs. I got dreadfully lonesome. I was so down-
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