| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Euthydemus by Plato: Nowhere, said Dionysodorus.
Then, I said, I do not know this.
You are ruining the argument, said Euthydemus to Dionysodorus; he will be
proved not to know, and then after all he will be knowing and not knowing
at the same time.
Dionysodorus blushed.
I turned to the other, and said, What do you think, Euthydemus? Does not
your omniscient brother appear to you to have made a mistake?
What, replied Dionysodorus in a moment; am I the brother of Euthydemus?
Thereupon I said, Please not to interrupt, my good friend, or prevent
Euthydemus from proving to me that I know the good to be unjust; such a
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Message by Honore de Balzac: girl of twenty; and, to come to the point, that a woman is no
older than she looks.
This theory set no limits to the age of love, so we struck out,
in all good faith, into a boundless sea. At length, when we had
portrayed our mistresses as young, charming, and devoted to us,
women of rank, women of taste, intellectual and clever; when we
had endowed them with little feet, a satin, nay, a delicately
fragrant skin, then came the admission--on his part that Madame
Such-an-one was thirty-eight years old, and on mine that I
worshiped a woman of forty. Whereupon, as if released on either
side from some kind of vague fear, our confidences came thick and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Salammbo by Gustave Flaubert: then disappear. They had always supplies of javelins and dromedaries
some distance off, and they would return more terrible than before,
howl like wolves, and take to flight like vultures. The Barbarians
posted at the extremities of the files fell one by one; and this would
continue until evening, when an attempt would be made to enter the
mountains.
Although they were perilous for elephants, Hamilcar made his way in
among them. He followed the long chain which extends from the
promontory of Hermaeum to the top of Zagouan. This, they believed, was
a device for hiding the insufficiency of his troops. But the continual
uncertainty in which he kept them exasperated them at last more than
Salammbo |
