| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Mrs. Warren's Profession by George Bernard Shaw: Man's will and his environment: in a word, of problem. The
vapidness of such drama as the pseudo-operatic plays contain lies
in the fact that in them animal passion, sentimentally diluted,
is shewn in conflict, not with real circumstances, but with a set
of conventions and assumptions half of which do not exist off the
stage, whilst the other half can either be evaded by a pretence
of compliance or defied with complete impunity by any reasonably
strong-minded person. Nobody can feel that such conventions are
really compulsory; and consequently nobody can believe in the
stage pathos that accepts them as an inexorable fate, or in the
genuineness of the people who indulge in such pathos. Sitting at
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: the very nature of his task, to make us feel the difference
of epochs instead of the essential identity of man, and even
in the originals only to those who can recognise their own
human virtues and defects in strange forms, often inverted
and under strange names, often interchanged. Martial is a
poet of no good repute, and it gives a man new thoughts to
read his works dispassionately, and find in this unseemly
jester's serious passages the image of a kind, wise, and
self-respecting gentleman. It is customary, I suppose, in
reading Martial, to leave out these pleasant verses; I never
heard of them, at least, until I found them for myself; and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Apology by Plato: have found them so grievous and odious that you will have no more of them,
others are likely to endure me. No indeed, men of Athens, that is not very
likely. And what a life should I lead, at my age, wandering from city to
city, ever changing my place of exile, and always being driven out! For I
am quite sure that wherever I go, there, as here, the young men will flock
to me; and if I drive them away, their elders will drive me out at their
request; and if I let them come, their fathers and friends will drive me
out for their sakes.
Some one will say: Yes, Socrates, but cannot you hold your tongue, and
then you may go into a foreign city, and no one will interfere with you?
Now I have great difficulty in making you understand my answer to this.
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