| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: profiting by the folly of fools, and the selfishness of the selfish; or
who might amuse them, in default of fighting-cocks, by puns and
repartees, and battles of logic; "how one thing cannot be predicated of
another," or "how the wise man is not only to overcome every misfortune,
but not even to feel it," and other such mighty questions, which in
those days hid that deep unbelief in any truth whatsoever which was
spreading fast over the minds of men. Such word-splitters were Stilpo
and Diodorus, the slayer and the slain. They were of the Megaran
school, and were named Dialectics; and also, with more truth, Eristics,
or quarrellers. Their clique had professed to follow Zeno and Socrates
in declaring the instability of sensible presumptions and conclusions,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Intentions by Oscar Wilde: creations, and not boast of them as copies. The justification of a
character in a novel is not that other persons are what they are,
but that the author is what he is. Otherwise the novel is not a
work of art. As for M. Paul Bourget, the master of the ROMAN
PSYCHOLOGIQUE, he commits the error of imagining that the men and
women of modern life are capable of being infinitely analysed for
an innumerable series of chapters. In point of fact what is
interesting about people in good society - and M. Bourget rarely
moves out of the Faubourg St. Germain, except to come to London, -
is the mask that each one of them wears, not the reality that lies
behind the mask. It is a humiliating confession, but we are all of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Merry Men by Robert Louis Stevenson: in his slippers and skull-cap.
The inn was not thirty yards away, but the messenger did not stop
there; he went in at one door and out by another into the court,
and then led the way by a flight of steps beside the stable, to the
loft where the mountebank lay sick. If Doctor Desprez were to live
a thousand years, he would never forget his arrival in that room;
for not only was the scene picturesque, but the moment made a date
in his existence. We reckon our lives, I hardly know why, from the
date of our first sorry appearance in society, as if from a first
humiliation; for no actor can come upon the stage with a worse
grace. Not to go further back, which would be judged too curious,
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