| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Crito by Plato: mind then, or rather have your mind already made up, for the time of
deliberation is over, and there is only one thing to be done, which must be
done this very night, and if we delay at all will be no longer practicable
or possible; I beseech you therefore, Socrates, be persuaded by me, and do
as I say.
SOCRATES: Dear Crito, your zeal is invaluable, if a right one; but if
wrong, the greater the zeal the greater the danger; and therefore we ought
to consider whether I shall or shall not do as you say. For I am and
always have been one of those natures who must be guided by reason,
whatever the reason may be which upon reflection appears to me to be the
best; and now that this chance has befallen me, I cannot repudiate my own
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: to dignity, the material approaches are still manifold and imposing.
Court within court, building after building, isolate the shrine
itself from the profane familiarity of the passers-by. But though
the material encasings vary in number and in exclusiveness,
according to the temperament of the particular race concerned, the
mental envelopes exist, and must exist, in both hemispheres alike,
so long as society resembles the crust of the earth on which it
dwells,--a crust composed of strata that grow denser as one
descends. What is clear to those on top seems obscure to those
below; what are weighty arguments to the second have no force at all
upon the first. There must necessarily be grades of elevation in
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: princes. "But is not this enough? Ah, brave Jason, turn back
before it is too late. It would grieve us to the heart, if you
and your nine and forty brave companions should be eaten up, at
fifty mouthfuls, by this execrable dragon."
"My young friends," quietly replied Jason, "I do not wonder
that you think the dragon very terrible. You have grown up from
infancy in the fear of this monster, and therefore still regard
him with the awe that children feel for the bugbears and
hobgoblins which their nurses have talked to them about. But,
in my view of the matter, the dragon is merely a pretty large
serpent, who is not half so likely to snap me up at one
Tanglewood Tales |
