| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Crito by Plato: proposed exile as the penalty, but then he declared that he preferred death
to exile. And whither will he direct his footsteps? In any well-ordered
state the Laws will consider him as an enemy. Possibly in a land of
misrule like Thessaly he may be welcomed at first, and the unseemly
narrative of his escape will be regarded by the inhabitants as an amusing
tale. But if he offends them he will have to learn another sort of lesson.
Will he continue to give lectures in virtue? That would hardly be decent.
And how will his children be the gainers if he takes them into Thessaly,
and deprives them of Athenian citizenship? Or if he leaves them behind,
does he expect that they will be better taken care of by his friends
because he is in Thessaly? Will not true friends care for them equally
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Before Adam by Jack London: descended, the more timid ones scurried for their
caves. I could see old Marrow-Bone tottering along as
fast as he could. Red-Eye sprang out from the wall and
finished the last twenty feet through the air. He
landed alongside a mother who was just beginning the
ascent. She screamed with fear, and the two-year-old
child that was clinging to her released its grip and
rolled at Red-Eye's feet. Both he and the mother
reached for it, and he got it. The next moment the
frail little body had whirled through the air and
shattered against the wall. The mother ran to it,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Silas Marner by George Eliot: the growth of the sum of straight strokes, arranged in triangles,
has become a mastering purpose? Do we not wile away moments of
inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or
sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient
habit? That will help us to understand how the love of accumulating
money grows an absorbing passion in men whose imaginations, even in
the very beginning of their hoard, showed them no purpose beyond it.
Marner wanted the heaps of ten to grow into a square, and then into
a larger square; and every added guinea, while it was itself a
satisfaction, bred a new desire. In this strange world, made a
hopeless riddle to him, he might, if he had had a less intense
Silas Marner |
