The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Apology by Plato: would not a man give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and
Hesiod and Homer? Nay, if this be true, let me die again and again. I
myself, too, shall have a wonderful interest in there meeting and
conversing with Palamedes, and Ajax the son of Telamon, and any other
ancient hero who has suffered death through an unjust judgment; and there
will be no small pleasure, as I think, in comparing my own sufferings with
theirs. Above all, I shall then be able to continue my search into true
and false knowledge; as in this world, so also in the next; and I shall
find out who is wise, and who pretends to be wise, and is not. What would
not a man give, O judges, to be able to examine the leader of the great
Trojan expedition; or Odysseus or Sisyphus, or numberless others, men and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson: The trees clung upon the slope, like sailors on the shrouds of a
ship, and their trunks were like the rounds of a ladder, by which
we mounted.
Quite at the top, and just before the rocky face of the cliff
sprang above the foliage, we found that strange house which was
known in the country as "Cluny's Cage." The trunks of several
trees had been wattled across, the intervals strengthened with
stakes, and the ground behind this barricade levelled up with
earth to make the floor. A tree, which grew out from the
hillside, was the living centre-beam of the roof. The walls were
of wattle and covered with moss. The whole house had something
Kidnapped |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: whatever he found to do. Most of his creditors, knowing him to be
a man of his word, patiently bided their time, until, in the
course of long years, he paid, with interest, every cent of what
he used to call, in rueful satire upon his own folly, his
"National Debt."
III. LAWYER LINCOLN
Unlucky as Lincoln's attempt at storekeeping had been, it served
one good purpose. Indeed, in a way it may be said to have
determined his whole future career. He had had a hard struggle to
decide between becoming a blacksmith or a lawyer; and when chance
seemed to offer a middle course, and he tried to be a merchant,
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