| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Alcibiades II by Platonic Imitator: deeming that he is asking for good, especially if the Gods are in the mood
to grant whatever he may request? There is the story of Oedipus, for
instance, who prayed that his children might divide their inheritance
between them by the sword: he did not, as he might have done, beg that his
present evils might be averted, but called down new ones. And was not his
prayer accomplished, and did not many and terrible evils thence arise, upon
which I need not dilate?
ALCIBIADES: Yes, Socrates, but you are speaking of a madman: surely you
do not think that any one in his senses would venture to make such a
prayer?
SOCRATES: Madness, then, you consider to be the opposite of discretion?
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Bab:A Sub-Deb, Mary Roberts Rinehart by Mary Roberts Rinehart: beech. What a physic! What shoulders, all brown and muscular! And
to think that, strong as they were, they wrote the tender Love
seens of his plays. Strong and tender--what descriptive words they
are! It was then that I saw he had been vacinated twice.
To resume. All the Pattens went in, and a new girl with them, in a
One-peace Suit. I do not deny that she was pretty. I only say that she
was not modest, and that the way she stood on the Patten's dock and
pozed for Mr. Beecher's benafit was unecessary and well, not respectable.
She was nothing to me, nor I to her. But I watched her closely. I
confess that I was interested in Mr. Beecher. Why not? He was a
Public Character, and entitled to respect. Nay, even to love. But
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Mosses From An Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne: laughing like demons around him. The fiend in his own shape is
less hideous than when he rages in the breast of man. Thus sped
the demoniac on his course, until, quivering among the trees, he
saw a red light before him, as when the felled trunks and
branches of a clearing have been set on fire, and throw up their
lurid blaze against the sky, at the hour of midnight. He paused,
in a lull of the tempest that had driven him onward, and heard
the swell of what seemed a hymn, rolling solemnly from a distance
with the weight of many voices. He knew the tune; it was a
familiar one in the choir of the village meeting-house. The verse
died heavily away, and was lengthened by a chorus, not of human
Mosses From An Old Manse |
