| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Common Sense by Thomas Paine: by the following method. When the delegates are met, let a colony be taken
from the whole thirteen colonies by lot, after which, let the whole Congress
choose (by ballot) a president from out of the delegates of that province.
In the next Congress, let a colony be taken by lot from twelve only, omitting
that colony from which the president was taken in the former Congress, and so
proceeding on till the whole thirteen shall have had their proper rotation.
And in order that nothing may pass into a law but what is satisfactorily
just not less than three fifths of the Congress to be called a majority--
He that will promote discord, under a government so equally formed as this,
would have joined Lucifer in his revolt.
But as there is a peculiar delicacy, from whom, or in what manner,
Common Sense |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from When the Sleeper Wakes by H. G. Wells: the days before his awakening, spoke with a brief
vividness of the girlish dreams that had given a bias
to her life, of the incredulous emotions his awakening
had aroused. She told him too of a tragic circumstance
of her girlhood that had darkened her life,
quickened her sense of injustice and opened her heart
prematurely to the wider sorrows of the world. For a
little time, so far as he was concerned, the great war
about them was but the vast ennobling background
to these personal things.
In an instant these personal relations were submerged.
When the Sleeper Wakes |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Memorabilia by Xenophon: position is in no wise materially affected, and thus, though he would
never dream of leaving his other possessions disregarded and ill cared
for, friendship's mute appeal is met with flat indifference.[1]
[1] Or, "the cry of a friend for careful tending falls on deaf ears."
Or to take (said he) a crowning instance:[2] with regard to ordinary
possessions, however multifarious these may be, most people are at
least acquainted with their number, but if you ask a man to enumerate
his friends, who are not so very many after all perhaps, he cannot; or
if, to oblige the inquirer, he essays to make a list, he will
presently retract the names of some whom he had previously
included.[3] Such is the amount of thought which people bestow upon
The Memorabilia |
