| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: Platonic dialogue, we must not forget that the form of the Platonic writing
was common to several of his contemporaries. Aeschines, Euclid, Phaedo,
Antisthenes, and in the next generation Aristotle, are all said to have
composed dialogues; and mistakes of names are very likely to have occurred.
Greek literature in the third century before Christ was almost as
voluminous as our own, and without the safeguards of regular publication,
or printing, or binding, or even of distinct titles. An unknown writing
was naturally attributed to a known writer whose works bore the same
character; and the name once appended easily obtained authority. A
tendency may also be observed to blend the works and opinions of the master
with those of his scholars. To a later Platonist, the difference between
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: and pay your respects to the fire that cooks your dinner, and the
oven that bakes your bread, and the necessary furniture and utensils
are the chief ornaments; where the washing is not put out, nor the
fire, nor the mistress, and perhaps you are sometimes requested to
move from off the trap-door, when the cook would descend into the
cellar, and so learn whether the ground is solid or hollow beneath
you without stamping. A house whose inside is as open and manifest
as a bird's nest, and you cannot go in at the front door and out at
the back without seeing some of its inhabitants; where to be a guest
is to be presented with the freedom of the house, and not to be
carefully excluded from seven eighths of it, shut up in a particular
Walden |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Melmoth Reconciled by Honore de Balzac: off the largest quantity of nitrogen asphyxiates the others, in the
long run.
The cashier was a man of five-and-forty or thereabouts. As he sat at
the table, the light from a moderator lamp shining full on his bald
head and glistening fringe of iron-gray hair that surrounded it--this
baldness and the round outlines of his face made his head look very
like a ball. His complexion was brick-red, a few wrinkles had gathered
about his eyes, but he had the smooth, plump hands of a stout man. His
blue cloth coat, a little rubbed and worn, and the creases and
shininess of his trousers, traces of hard wear that the clothes-brush
fails to remove, would impress a superficial observer with the idea
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