| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Euthydemus by Plato: being initiated into the mysteries of the sophistical ritual. This is all
a sort of horse-play, which is now ended. The exhortation to virtue will
follow, and Socrates himself (if the wise men will not laugh at him) is
desirous of showing the way in which such an exhortation should be carried
on, according to his own poor notion. He proceeds to question Cleinias.
The result of the investigation may be summed up as follows:--
All men desire good; and good means the possession of goods, such as
wealth, health, beauty, birth, power, honour; not forgetting the virtues
and wisdom. And yet in this enumeration the greatest good of all is
omitted. What is that? Good fortune. But what need is there of good
fortune when we have wisdom already:--in every art and business are not the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Young Forester by Zane Grey: blown down. The amount of rotting wood equals the yearly growth. Now, I
want to show you the worst enemies of the trees. Here's a big white oak, a
hundred and fifty years old. It's almost dead. See the little holes bored
in the bark. They were made by a beetle. Look!"
I swung my hatchet and split off a section of bark. Everywhere in the bark
and round the tree ran little dust-filled grooves. I pried out a number of
tiny brown beetles, somewhat the shape of a pinching-bug, only very much
smaller.
"There! You'd hardly think that that great tree was killed by a lot of
little bugs, would you? They girdle the trees and prevent the sap from
flowing."
The Young Forester |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Hidden Masterpiece by Honore de Balzac: perhaps because the neophyte stood still beneath the spell which holds
a heaven-born painter as he sees for the first time an atelier filled
with the materials and instruments of his art. Daylight came from a
casement in the roof and fell, focussed as it were, upon a canvas
which rested on an easel in the middle of the room, and which bore, as
yet, only three or four chalk lines. The light thus concentrated did
not reach the dark angles of the vast atelier; but a few wandering
reflections gleamed through the russet shadows on the silvered
breastplate of a horseman's cuirass of the fourteenth century as it
hung from the wall, or sent sharp lines of light upon the carved and
polished cornice of a dresser which held specimens of rare pottery and
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