| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Main Street by Sinclair Lewis: "Checkmate!" murmured Carol, as she held up her hand.
Had she actually believed that she could plant a seed of
liberalism in the blank wall of mediocrity? How had she
fallen into the folly of trying to plant anything whatever in a
wall so smooth and sun-glazed, and so satisfying to the happy
sleepers within?
CHAPTER XII
ONE week of authentic spring, one rare sweet week of May,
one tranquil moment between the blast of winter and the charge
of summer. Daily Carol walked from town into flashing
country hysteric with new life.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: direction of Lysias or Thrasymachus.
PHAEDRUS: In what direction then?
SOCRATES: I conceive Pericles to have been the most accomplished of
rhetoricians.
PHAEDRUS: What of that?
SOCRATES: All the great arts require discussion and high speculation about
the truths of nature; hence come loftiness of thought and completeness of
execution. And this, as I conceive, was the quality which, in addition to
his natural gifts, Pericles acquired from his intercourse with Anaxagoras
whom he happened to know. He was thus imbued with the higher philosophy,
and attained the knowledge of Mind and the negative of Mind, which were
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Confidence by Henry James: him in his wanderings--letters as cordial, to all appearance,
if not as voluminous, as the punctual missives of an earlier time.
Bernard made a point of satisfying himself that they were as cordial;
he weighed them in the scales of impartial suspicion. It seemed
to him on the whole that there was no relaxation of Gordon's
epistolary tone. If he wrote less often than he used to do,
that was a thing that very commonly happened as men grew older.
The closest intimacies, moreover, had phases and seasons,
intermissions and revivals, and even if his friend had, in fact,
averted his countenance from him, this was simply the accomplishment
of a periodical revolution which would bring them in due order
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