| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: beauty, or both. Critias, glancing at the door, invited my attention to
some youths who were coming in, and talking noisily to one another,
followed by a crowd. Of the beauties, Socrates, he said, I fancy that you
will soon be able to form a judgment. For those who are just entering are
the advanced guard of the great beauty, as he is thought to be, of the day,
and he is likely to be not far off himself.
Who is he, I said; and who is his father?
Charmides, he replied, is his name; he is my cousin, and the son of my
uncle Glaucon: I rather think that you know him too, although he was not
grown up at the time of your departure.
Certainly, I know him, I said, for he was remarkable even then when he was
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Man of Business by Honore de Balzac: gauged the man's infatuation, and was very well satisfied to find that
the varnished doors of a tolerably sumptuous future were ready to turn
at a word from Antonia so soon as his own fancy had passed off.
" 'And that other one yonder?' asked he, pointing out the stout fine-
looking elderly man with the Cross of the Legion of Honor. 'Who is
he?'
" 'A retired custom-house officer.'
" 'The cut of his countenance is not reassuring,' said Maxime,
beholding the Sieur Denisart.
"And indeed the old soldier held himself upright as a steeple. His
head was remarkable for the amount of powder and pomatum bestowed upon
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Figure in the Carpet by Henry James: pages, but he withheld the page I most feverishly sought. He wrote
on a thousand subjects, but never on the subject of Vereker. His
special line was to tell truths that other people either "funked,"
as he said, or overlooked, but he never told the only truth that
seemed to me in these days to signify. I met the couple in those
literary circles referred to in the papers: I have sufficiently
intimated that it was only in such circles we were all constructed
to revolve. Gwendolen was more than ever committed to them by the
publication of her third novel, and I myself definitely classed by
holding the opinion that this work was inferior to its immediate
predecessor. Was it worse because she had been keeping worse
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