| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Astoria by Washington Irving: head waters of the Columbia.
In the course of conversation, the Indian informed them that the
route by which Mr. Hunt had crossed the Rocky Mountains was very
bad and circuitous, and that he knew one much shorter and easier.
Mr. Stuart urged him to accompany them as guide, promising to
reward him with a pistol with powder and ball, a knife, an awl,
some blue beads, a blanket, and a looking-glass. Such a catalogue
of riches was too tempting to be resisted; besides the poor Snake
languished after the prairies; he was tired, he said, of salmon,
and longed for buffalo meat, and to have a grand buffalo hunt
beyond the mountains. He departed, therefore, with all speed, to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Parmenides by Plato: be an idea?
From that, again, there is no escape.
Then, said Parmenides, if you say that everything else participates in the
ideas, must you not say either that everything is made up of thoughts, and
that all things think; or that they are thoughts but have no thought?
The latter view, Parmenides, is no more rational than the previous one. In
my opinion, the ideas are, as it were, patterns fixed in nature, and other
things are like them, and resemblances of them--what is meant by the
participation of other things in the ideas, is really assimilation to them.
But if, said he, the individual is like the idea, must not the idea also be
like the individual, in so far as the individual is a resemblance of the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no
place could ever be strange to me again.
"Mourning untimely consumes the sad;
Few are their days in the land of the living,
Beautiful daughter of Toscar."
Some of my pleasantest hours were during the long rain-storms in
the spring or fall, which confined me to the house for the afternoon
as well as the forenoon, soothed by their ceaseless roar and
pelting; when an early twilight ushered in a long evening in which
many thoughts had time to take root and unfold themselves. In those
driving northeast rains which tried the village houses so, when the
Walden |
