| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: ugliness she frowns and contracts and has a sense of pain, and turns away,
and shrivels up, and not without a pang refrains from conception. And this
is the reason why, when the hour of conception arrives, and the teeming
nature is full, there is such a flutter and ecstasy about beauty whose
approach is the alleviation of the pain of travail. For love, Socrates, is
not, as you imagine, the love of the beautiful only.' 'What then?' 'The
love of generation and of birth in beauty.' 'Yes,' I said. 'Yes, indeed,'
she replied. 'But why of generation?' 'Because to the mortal creature,
generation is a sort of eternity and immortality,' she replied; 'and if, as
has been already admitted, love is of the everlasting possession of the
good, all men will necessarily desire immortality together with good:
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Father Goriot by Honore de Balzac: the way to ring the changes, and giving you a sight of the
mechanism of the social machine; but your first fright will go
off like a conscript's terror on the battlefield. You will grow
used to regarding men as common soldiers who have made up their
minds to lose their lives for some self-constituted king. Times
have altered strangely. Once you could say to a bravo, 'Here are
a hundred crowns; go and kill Monsieur So-and-so for me,' and you
could sup quietly after turning some one off into the dark for
the least thing in the world. But nowadays I propose to put you
in the way of a handsome fortune; you have only to nod your head,
it won't compromise you in any way, and you hesitate. 'Tis an
Father Goriot |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Alcibiades I by Plato: SOCRATES: Nay, you can say that he is the user of the body.
ALCIBIADES: Yes.
SOCRATES: And the user of the body is the soul?
ALCIBIADES: Yes, the soul.
SOCRATES: And the soul rules?
ALCIBIADES: Yes.
SOCRATES: Let me make an assertion which will, I think, be universally
admitted.
ALCIBIADES: What is it?
SOCRATES: That man is one of three things.
ALCIBIADES: What are they?
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