| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: Peloponnesians, or Peloponnesians among Athenians, he must be a good
rhetorician who could succeed and gain credit. But there is no difficulty
in a man's winning applause when he is contending for fame among the
persons whom he is praising.
MENEXENUS: Do you think not, Socrates?
SOCRATES: Certainly 'not.'
MENEXENUS: Do you think that you could speak yourself if there should be a
necessity, and if the Council were to choose you?
SOCRATES: That I should be able to speak is no great wonder, Menexenus,
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
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy: "It is not the same to her, poor thing, as it would be to me
doing it over again with my present knowledge," Sue whispered.
"You see, they are fresh to it, and take the proceedings
as a matter of course. But having been awakened to its awful
solemnity as we have, or at least as I have, by experience,
and to my own too squeamish feelings perhaps sometimes,
it really does seem immoral in me to go and undertake the same
thing again with open eyes. Coming in here and seeing this
has frightened me from a church wedding as much as the other
did from a registry one.... We are a weak, tremulous pair,
Jude, and what others may feel confident in I feel doubts of--
Jude the Obscure |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from 1984 by George Orwell: now engaged in compiling the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary.
He was a tiny creature, smaller than Winston, with dark hair and large,
protuberant eyes, at once mournful and derisive, which seemed to search
your face closely while he was speaking to you.
'I wanted to ask you whether you'd got any razor blades,' he said.
'Not one!' said Winston with a sort of guilty haste. 'I've tried all over
the place. They don't exist any longer.'
Everyone kept asking you for razor blades. Actually he had two unused ones
which he was hoarding up. There had been a famine of them for months past.
At any given moment there was some necessary article which the Party shops
were unable to supply. Sometimes it was buttons, sometimes it was darning
1984 |
