| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Odyssey by Homer: by the postern gate, and his heart was divided within him,
whether he should slip forth from the hall and sit down by
the well-wrought altar of great Zeus of the household
court, whereon Laertes and Odysseus had burnt many pieces
of the thighs of oxen, or should spring forward and beseech
Odysseus by his knees. And as he thought thereupon this
seemed to him the better way, to embrace the knees of
Odysseus, son of Laertes. So he laid the hollow lyre on the
ground between the mixing-bowl and the high seat inlaid
with silver, and himself sprang forward and seized Odysseus
by the knees, and besought him and spake winged words:
The Odyssey |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Deserted Woman by Honore de Balzac: acquaintance of the persons whom this exclusive society considered to
be "the whole town." Gaston de Nueil recognized in them the invariable
stock characters which every observer finds in every one of the many
capitals of the little States which made up the France of an older
day.
First of all comes the family whose claims to nobility are regarded as
incontestable, and of the highest antiquity in the department, though
no one has so much as heard of them a bare fifty leagues away. This
species of royal family on a small scale is distantly, but
unmistakably, connected with the Navarreins and the Grandlieu family,
and related to the Cadignans, and the Blamont-Chauvrys. The head of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lesser Hippias by Plato: better made able to assume evil and disgraceful figures and postures
voluntarily, as he who is worse made assumes them involuntarily?
HIPPIAS: True.
SOCRATES: Then voluntary ungracefulness comes from excellence of the
bodily frame, and involuntary from the defect of the bodily frame?
HIPPIAS: True.
SOCRATES: And what would you say of an unmusical voice; would you prefer
the voice which is voluntarily or involuntarily out of tune?
HIPPIAS: That which is voluntarily out of tune.
SOCRATES: The involuntary is the worse of the two?
HIPPIAS: Yes.
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