| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) by Dante Alighieri: Which were: "Behold now the sore penalty,
Thou, who dost breathing go the dead beholding;
Behold if any be as great as this.
And so that thou may carry news of me,
Know that Bertram de Born am I, the same
Who gave to the Young King the evil comfort.
I made the father and the son rebellious;
Achitophel not more with Absalom
And David did with his accursed goadings.
Because I parted persons so united,
Parted do I now bear my brain, alas!
The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from In the Cage by Henry James: monstrous; she certainly often threw herself into a defiant
conviction that she would have done the whole thing much better.
But her greatest comfort, mostly, was her comparative vision of the
men; by whom I mean the unmistakeable gentlemen, for she had no
interest in the spurious or the shabby and no mercy at all for the
poor. She could have found a sixpence, outside, for an appearance
of want; but her fancy, in some directions so alert, had never a
throb of response for any sign of the sordid. The men she did
track, moreover, she tracked mainly in one relation, the relation
as to which the cage convinced her, she believed, more than
anything else could have done, that it was quite the most diffused.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Apology by Plato: Anaxagoras; the Athenian people are not so ignorant as to attribute to the
influence of Socrates notions which have found their way into the drama,
and may be learned at the theatre. Socrates undertakes to show that
Meletus (rather unjustifiably) has been compounding a riddle in this part
of the indictment: 'There are no gods, but Socrates believes in the
existence of the sons of gods, which is absurd.'
Leaving Meletus, who has had enough words spent upon him, he returns to the
original accusation. The question may be asked, Why will he persist in
following a profession which leads him to death? Why?--because he must
remain at his post where the god has placed him, as he remained at
Potidaea, and Amphipolis, and Delium, where the generals placed him.
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