| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce: substantial _quid_.
INFALAPSARIAN, n. One who ventures to believe that Adam need not have
sinned unless he had a mind to -- in opposition to the
Supralapsarians, who hold that that luckless person's fall was decreed
from the beginning. Infralapsarians are sometimes called
Sublapsarians without material effect upon the importance and lucidity
of their views about Adam.
Two theologues once, as they wended their way
To chapel, engaged in colloquial fray --
An earnest logomachy, bitter as gall,
Concerning poor Adam and what made him fall.
The Devil's Dictionary |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Stories From the Old Attic by Robert Harris: penetrating insights into human nature. As the years passed,
however, even though he had been begged repeatedly for the first
part, or a first volume, or even a first chapter, he had always
answered that he wanted to get the whole work clearly in his head
before he put it down on paper.
"To rush precipitously forward without knowing precisely where one
wants to go," he would tell them, "will not of necessity produce a
happy outcome because it might lead to a complicative erroneity or
put one on a train to a destination he would not ultimately wish to
visit. After all, the most beautiful part of a given day is known
only after dark, and the best path up the mountain--which I take to
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: sky, blue when it is clear, gray when the clouds are gathering, and
sometimes as black as ink under the shadow of storm. But when it
is still, the water itself is like that river which one of the
poets has described as
"Flowing with a smooth brown current."
And in this sheet of burnished bronze the mountains and islands
were reflected perfectly, and the sun shone back from it, not in
broken gleams or a wide lane of light, but like a single ball of
fire, moving before us as we moved.
But stop! What is that dark speck on the water, away down toward
Turtle Point? It has just the shape and size of a deer's head. It
|
