| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy: rest had done, and Nekhludoff felt that he had committed
something akin to an impropriety. In the evening, soon after
dinner, the large hall, with high-backed carved chairs arranged
in rows as for a meeting, and an armchair next to a little table,
with a bottle of water for the speaker, began to fill with people
come to hear the foreigner, Kiesewetter, preach. Elegant
equipages stopped at the front entrance. In the hall sat
richly-dressed ladies in silks and velvets and lace, with false
hair and false busts and drawn-in waists, and among them men in
uniform and evening dress, and about five persons of the common
class, i.e., two men-servants, a shop-keeper, a footman, and a
Resurrection |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson: "you have heard the news?"
The doctor shuddered. "They were crying it in the square," he
said. "I heard them in my dining-room."
"One word," said the lawyer. "Carew was my client, but so are
you, and I want to know what I am doing. You have not been mad
enough to hide this fellow?"
"Utterson, I swear to God," cried the doctor, "I swear to God
I will never set eyes on him again. I bind my honour to you that
I am done with him in this world. It is all at an end. And
indeed he does not want my help; you do not know him as I do; he
is safe, he is quite safe; mark my words, he will never more be
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: language is a natural organism. He would have heard with surprise that
languages are the common work of whole nations in a primitive or semi-
barbarous age. How, he would probably have argued, could men devoid of art
have contrived a structure of such complexity? No answer could have been
given to this question, either in ancient or in modern times, until the
nature of primitive antiquity had been thoroughly studied, and the
instincts of man had been shown to exist in greater force, when his state
approaches more nearly to that of children or animals. The philosophers of
the last century, after their manner, would have vainly endeavoured to
trace the process by which proper names were converted into common, and
would have shown how the last effort of abstraction invented prepositions
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