| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Polity of Athenians and Lacedaemonians by Xenophon: a class of people who fare better owing to the sojourn of foreigners
at Athens. Further still, supposing the allies had not to resort to
Athens for the hearing of cases, only the official representative of
the imperial state would be held in honour, such as the general, or
trierarch, or ambassador. Whereas now every single individual among
the allies is forced to pay flattery to the People of Athens because
he knows that he must betake himself to Athens and win or lose[48] his
case at the bar, not of any stray set of judges, but of the sovereign
People itself, such being the law and custom at Athens. He is
compelled to behave as a suppliant[49] in the courts of justice, and
when some juryman comes into court, to grasp his hand. For this
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Altar of the Dead by Henry James: this occasion, as it happened, after a year had passed, that he
began to observe his altar to be haunted by a worshipper at least
as frequent as himself. Others of the faithful, and in the rest of
the church, came and went, appealing sometimes, when they
disappeared, to a vague or to a particular recognition; but this
unfailing presence was always to be observed when he arrived and
still in possession when he departed. He was surprised, the first
time, at the promptitude with which it assumed an identity for him
- the identity of the lady whom two years before, on his
anniversary, he had seen so intensely bowed, and of whose tragic
face he had had so flitting a vision. Given the time that had
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: question fell on the banter of the other two, and she saw the
shadow of the same surprise flit across Alida's clear pupils.
"I suppose so. One just has to wait."
"Oh, hang waiting!" Ned broke in. "Life's too short for a ghost
who can only be enjoyed in retrospect. Can't we do better than
that, Mary?"
But it turned out that in the event they were not destined to,
for within three months of their conversation with Mrs. Stair
they were established at Lyng, and the life they had yearned for
to the point of planning it out in all its daily details had
actually begun for them.
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