| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbot: of the Spaceland race, I should like to remove it, so far as I can
honestly do so. But the Square is so unaccustomed to the use
of the moral terminology of Spaceland that I should be doing him
an injustice if I were literally to transcribe his defence against
this charge. Acting, therefore, as his interpreter and summarizer,
I gather that in the course of an imprisonment of seven years
he has himself modified his own personal views, both as regards Women
and as regards the Isosceles or Lower Classes. Personally,
he now inclines to the opinion of the Sphere that the Straight Lines
are in many important respects superior to the Circles.
But, writing as a Historian, he has identified himself
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: people, and some critics who, though not stupid, had not
themselves written what the Germans call "tendency" works, saw
nothing in this but a fantastic affectation of the extravagant
self-conceit of knowing more about Ibsen than Ibsen himself.
Fortunately, in taking exactly the same position now with regard
to Wagner, I can claim his own authority to support me. "How," he
wrote to Roeckel on the 23rd. August 1856, "can an artist expect
that what he has felt intuitively should be perfectly realized by
others, seeing that he himself feels in the presence of his work,
if it is true Art, that he is confronted by a riddle, about which
he, too, might have illusions, just as another might?"
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Call of the Wild by Jack London: the other dogs turned him out of his sleeping robe, fearful that
Buck and Spitz were at it.
But the opportunity did not present itself, and they pulled into
Dawson one dreary afternoon with the great fight still to come.
Here were many men, and countless dogs, and Buck found them all at
work. It seemed the ordained order of things that dogs should
work. All day they swung up and down the main street in long
teams, and in the night their jingling bells still went by. They
hauled cabin logs and firewood, freighted up to the mines, and did
all manner of work that horses did in the Santa Clara Valley.
Here and there Buck met Southland dogs, but in the main they were
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