| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: wonderful to think of at a time when knowledge itself could hardly be said
to exist. It is this more than any other element which distinguishes
Plato, not only from the presocratic philosophers, but from Socrates
himself.
We have not yet reached the confines of Aristotle, but we make a somewhat
nearer approach to him in the Philebus than in the earlier Platonic
writings. The germs of logic are beginning to appear, but they are not
collected into a whole, or made a separate science or system. Many
thinkers of many different schools have to be interposed between the
Parmenides or Philebus of Plato, and the Physics or Metaphysics of
Aristotle. It is this interval upon which we have to fix our minds if we
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Dracula by Bram Stoker: door of the steam launch. Lord Godalming is firing up.
He is an experienced hand at the work, as he has had for years
a launch of his own on the Thames, and another on the Norfolk Broads.
Regarding our plans, we finally decided that Mina's guess
was correct, and that if any waterway was chosen for the Count's
escape back to his Castle, the Sereth and then the Bistritza
at its junction, would be the one. We took it, that somewhere
about the 47th degree, north latitude, would be the place chosen
for crossing the country between the river and the Carpathians.
We have no fear in running at good speed up the river at night.
There is plenty of water, and the banks are wide enough
Dracula |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Pierre Grassou by Honore de Balzac: his honest face an expression of pride. He was like a schoolboy
protecting a woman. He met Joseph Bridau, one of his comrades, and one
of those eccentric geniuses destined to fame and sorrow. Joseph
Bridau, who had, to use his own expression, a few sous in his pocket,
took Fougeres to the Opera. But Fougeres didn't see the ballet, didn't
hear the music; he was imagining pictures, he was painting. He left
Joseph in the middle of the evening, and ran home to make sketches by
lamp-light. He invented thirty pictures, all reminiscence, and felt
himself a man of genius. The next day he bought colors, and canvases
of various dimensions; he piled up bread and cheese on his table, he
filled a water-pot with water, he laid in a provision of wood for his
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