| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett: Indian remedy, and its price was but fifteen cents; the whispered
directions could be heard as customers passed the windows. With
most remedies the purchaser was allowed to depart unadmonished from
the kitchen, Mrs. Todd being a wise saver of steps; but with
certain vials she gave cautions, standing in the doorway, and
there were other doses which had to be accompanied on their healing
way as far as the gate, while she muttered long chapters of
directions, and kept up an air of secrecy and importance to the
last. It may not have been only the common aids of humanity with
which she tried to cope; it seemed sometimes as if love and hate
and jealousy and adverse winds at sea might also find their proper
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Philebus by Plato: omnipresent nature is more akin to pleasure or to mind.
PROTARCHUS: Quite right; in that way we shall be better able to judge.
SOCRATES: And there is no difficulty in seeing the cause which renders any
mixture either of the highest value or of none at all.
PROTARCHUS: What do you mean?
SOCRATES: Every man knows it.
PROTARCHUS: What?
SOCRATES: He knows that any want of measure and symmetry in any mixture
whatever must always of necessity be fatal, both to the elements and to the
mixture, which is then not a mixture, but only a confused medley which
brings confusion on the possessor of it.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Woman of No Importance by Oscar Wilde: lips that touch their brow have known the kiss of sin. It was you
I thought of all the time; I gave to them the love you did not
need: lavished on them a love that was not theirs . . . And you
thought I spent too much of my time in going to Church, and in
Church duties. But where else could I turn? God's house is the
only house where sinners are made welcome, and you were always in
my heart, Gerald, too much in my heart. For, though day after day,
at morn or evensong, I have knelt in God's house, I have never
repented of my sin. How could I repent of my sin when you, my
love, were its fruit! Even now that you are bitter to me I cannot
repent. I do not. You are more to me than innocence. I would
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