| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Crito by Plato: you never stirred out of her; the halt, the blind, the maimed, were not
more stationary in her than you were. And now you run away and forsake
your agreements. Not so, Socrates, if you will take our advice; do not
make yourself ridiculous by escaping out of the city.
'For just consider, if you transgress and err in this sort of way, what
good will you do either to yourself or to your friends? That your friends
will be driven into exile and deprived of citizenship, or will lose their
property, is tolerably certain; and you yourself, if you fly to one of the
neighbouring cities, as, for example, Thebes or Megara, both of which are
well governed, will come to them as an enemy, Socrates, and their
government will be against you, and all patriotic citizens will cast an
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass: that hopeless tide of things which brought power to one race, and
unrequited toil to another, until, finally, he stumbled upon
<6>his "first-found Ammonite," hidden away down in the depths of
his own nature, and which revealed to him the fact that liberty
and right, for all men, were anterior to slavery and wrong. When
his knowledge of the world was bounded by the visible horizon on
Col. Lloyd's plantation, and while every thing around him bore a
fixed, iron stamp, as if it had always been so, this was, for one
so young, a notable discovery.
To his uncommon memory, then, we must add a keen and accurate
insight into men and things; an original breadth of common sense
My Bondage and My Freedom |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Hated Son by Honore de Balzac: insupportably stern eyes.
Implacable as the war then going on between the Church and Calvinism,
the count's forehead was threatening even while he slept. Many
furrows, produced by the emotions of a warrior life, gave it a vague
resemblance to the vermiculated stone which we see in the buildings of
that period; his hair, like the whitish lichen of old oaks, gray
before its time, surrounded without grace a cruel brow, where
religious intolerance showed its passionate brutality. The shape of
the aquiline nose, which resembled the beak of a bird of prey, the
black and crinkled lids of the yellow eyes, the prominent bones of a
hollow face, the rigidity of the wrinkles, the disdain expressed in
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