| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Alcibiades I by Plato: you, and of your brother, and who can do as he pleases not only in this
city, but in all Hellas, and among many and mighty barbarous nations.
Moreover, you are rich; but I must say that you value yourself least of all
upon your possessions. And all these things have lifted you up; you have
overcome your lovers, and they have acknowledged that you were too much for
them. Have you not remarked their absence? And now I know that you wonder
why I, unlike the rest of them, have not gone away, and what can be my
motive in remaining.
ALCIBIADES: Perhaps, Socrates, you are not aware that I was just going to
ask you the very same question--What do you want? And what is your motive
in annoying me, and always, wherever I am, making a point of coming?
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Heroes by Charles Kingsley: gate; and there she bade Jason dig a ditch, and kill the
lamb, and leave it there, and strew on it magic herbs and
honey from the honeycomb.
Then sprang up through the earth, with the red fire flashing
before her, Brimo the wild witch-huntress, while her mad
hounds howled around. She had one head like a horse's, and
another like a ravening hound's, and another like a hissing
snake's, and a sword in either hand. And she leapt into the
ditch with her hounds, and they ate and drank their fill,
while Jason and Orpheus trembled, and Medeia hid her eyes.
And at last the witch-queen vanished, and fled with her
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: twenty-three years since I had seen the sun set over that land;
and we drove on in the darkness which fell swiftly upon the livid
expanse of snows till, out of the waste of a white earth joining
a bestarred sky, surged up black shapes, the clumps of trees
about a village of the Ukrainian plain. A cottage or two glided
by, a low interminable wall, and then, glimmering and winking
through a screen of fir-trees, the lights of the master's house.
That very evening the wandering MS. of "Almayer's Folly" was
unpacked and unostentatiously laid on the writing-table in my
room, the guest-room which had been, I was informed in an
affectionately careless tone, awaiting me for some fifteen years
A Personal Record |
