| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo: Besides, we might miss the funeral without missing the riot."
"Ah! the riot, I am with you!" cried Joly.
Laigle rubbed his hands.
"Now we're going to touch up the revolution of 1830. As a matter
of fact, it does hurt the people along the seams."
"I don't think much of your revolution," said Grantaire. "I don't
execrate this Government. It is the crown tempered by the cotton
night-cap. It is a sceptre ending in an umbrella. In fact, I think
that to-day, with the present weather, Louis Philippe might utilize
his royalty in two directions, he might extend the tip of the sceptre
end against the people, and open the umbrella end against heaven."
Les Miserables |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: considering that I have an excellent mistress in the art of rhetoric,--she
who has made so many good speakers, and one who was the best among all the
Hellenes--Pericles, the son of Xanthippus.
MENEXENUS: And who is she? I suppose that you mean Aspasia.
SOCRATES: Yes, I do; and besides her I had Connus, the son of Metrobius,
as a master, and he was my master in music, as she was in rhetoric. No
wonder that a man who has received such an education should be a finished
speaker; even the pupil of very inferior masters, say, for example, one who
had learned music of Lamprus, and rhetoric of Antiphon the Rhamnusian,
might make a figure if he were to praise the Athenians among the Athenians.
MENEXENUS: And what would you be able to say if you had to speak?
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: myriad small fields dies out into the distance; the strips blend and
disappear; and the dead flat lies forth open and empty, with no
accident save perhaps a thin line of trees or faint church spire
against the sky. Solemn and vast at all times, in spite of pettiness
in the near details, the impression becomes more solemn and vast
towards evening. The sun goes down, a swollen orange, as it were
into the sea. A blue-clad peasant rides home, with a harrow smoking
behind him among the dry clods. Another still works with his wife in
their little strip. An immense shadow fills the plain; these people
stand in it up to their shoulders; and their heads, as they stoop
over their work and rise again, are relieved from time to time
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