| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: when she next opened her eyes to look the room would be as usual.
After a considerable number of vain experiments, she resolved to put
the matter beyond a doubt. She got out of bed and stood upright,
holding on to the brass ball at the end of the bedstead.
Ice-cold at first, it soon became as hot as the palm of her hand,
and as the pains in her head and body and the instability of the floor
proved that it would be far more intolerable to stand and walk
than to lie in bed, she got into bed again; but though the change
was refreshing at first, the discomfort of bed was soon as great
as the discomfort of standing up. She accepted the idea that she
would have to stay in bed all day long, and as she laid her head
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Moby Dick by Herman Melville: interval (in one instance of three years), has been again struck by
the same hand, and slain; when the two irons, both marked by the same
private cypher, have been taken from the body. In the instance where
three years intervened between the flinging of the two harpoons; and
I think it may have been something more than that; the man who darted
them happening, in the interval, to go in a trading ship on a voyage
to Africa, went ashore there, joined a discovery party, and
penetrated far into the interior, where he travelled for a period of
nearly two years, often endangered by serpents, savages, tigers,
poisonous miasmas, with all the other common perils incident to
wandering in the heart of unknown regions. Meanwhile, the whale he
Moby Dick |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Alcibiades II by Platonic Imitator: it. And if, moreover, the spirit of poetry happen to seize on a man who is
of a begrudging temper and does not care to manifest his wisdom but keeps
it to himself as far as he can, it does indeed require an almost superhuman
wisdom to discover what the poet would be at. You surely do not suppose
that Homer, the wisest and most divine of poets, was unaware of the
impossibility of knowing a thing badly: for it was no less a person than
he who said of Margites that 'he knew many things, but knew them all
badly.' The solution of the riddle is this, I imagine:--By 'badly' Homer
meant 'bad' and 'knew' stands for 'to know.' Put the words together;--the
metre will suffer, but the poet's meaning is clear;--'Margites knew all
these things, but it was bad for him to know them.' And, obviously, if it
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