| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne: could scarcely discern the fort of Chupenie, twenty miles
south-westward from Benares, the ancient stronghold of the rajahs
of Behar; or Ghazipur and its famous rose-water factories; or the
tomb of Lord Cornwallis, rising on the left bank of the Ganges;
the fortified town of Buxar, or Patna, a large manufacturing and
trading-place, where is held the principal opium market of India;
or Monghir, a more than European town, for it is as English as
Manchester or Birmingham, with its iron foundries, edgetool factories,
and high chimneys puffing clouds of black smoke heavenward.
Night came on; the train passed on at full speed, in the midst
of the roaring of the tigers, bears, and wolves which fled before
Around the World in 80 Days |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Letters of Two Brides by Honore de Balzac: waist, while he kissed me on the cheeks and forehead.
"The pleasure with which we shall watch your success in society will
atone for the disappointment we felt at your change of vocation," he
said. Then, turning to my mother, "Do you know that she is going to
turn out very pretty, and you will be proud of her some day?--Here is
your brother, Rhetore.--Alphonse," he said to a fine young man who
came in, "here is your convent-bred sister, who threatens to send her
nun's frock to the deuce."
My brother came up in a leisurely way and took my hand, which he
pressed.
"Come, come, you may kiss her," said my father.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: we say with Aristotle, that the soul is the entelechy or form of an
organized living body? or with Plato, that she has a life of her own? Is
the Pythagorean image of the harmony, or that of the monad, the truer
expression? Is the soul related to the body as sight to the eye, or as the
boatman to his boat? (Arist. de Anim.) And in another state of being is
the soul to be conceived of as vanishing into infinity, hardly possessing
an existence which she can call her own, as in the pantheistic system of
Spinoza: or as an individual informing another body and entering into new
relations, but retaining her own character? (Compare Gorgias.) Or is the
opposition of soul and body a mere illusion, and the true self neither soul
nor body, but the union of the two in the 'I' which is above them? And is
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