| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad: "It was the setting of that sail which--" I began.
"God's own hand in it," he interrupted me. "Nothing less could have done it.
I don't mind telling you that I hardly dared give the order.
It seemed impossible that we could touch anything without losing it,
and then our last hope would have been gone."
The terror of that gale was on him yet. I let him go on for a bit,
then said, casually--as if returning to a minor subject:
"You were very anxious to give up your mate to the shore people, I believe?"
He was. To the law. His obscure tenacity on that point had in it
something incomprehensible and a little awful; something, as it
were, mystical, quite apart from his anxiety that he should
The Secret Sharer |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from One Basket by Edna Ferber: they would have been amused. Sometimes, dead-tired by nine
o'clock after a hard day downtown, he would doze over the evening
paper. At intervals he would wake, red-eyed, to a snatch of
conversation such as, "Yes, but if you get a blue you can wear
it anywhere. It's dressy, and at the same time it's quiet,
too." Eva, the expert, wrestling with Carrie over the problem
of the new spring dress. They never guessed that the com-
monplace man in the frayed old smoking jacket had banished them
all from the room long ago; had banished himself, for that
matter. In his place was a tall, debonair, and rather
dangerously handsome man to whom six o'clock spelled evening
One Basket |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Meno by Plato: Socrates was not to be attributed to badness or malevolence, but rather to
a tendency in men's minds. Or he may have been regardless of the
historical truth of the characters of his dialogue, as in the case of Meno
and Critias. Like Chaerephon (Apol.) the real Anytus was a democrat, and
had joined Thrasybulus in the conflict with the thirty.
The Protagoras arrived at a sort of hypothetical conclusion, that if
'virtue is knowledge, it can be taught.' In the Euthydemus, Socrates
himself offered an example of the manner in which the true teacher may draw
out the mind of youth; this was in contrast to the quibbling follies of the
Sophists. In the Meno the subject is more developed; the foundations of
the enquiry are laid deeper, and the nature of knowledge is more distinctly
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