| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo: officer named Cambronne. At each discharge, the square diminished
and replied. It replied to the grape-shot with a fusillade,
continually contracting its four walls. The fugitives pausing
breathless for a moment in the distance, listened in the darkness
to that gloomy and ever-decreasing thunder.
When this legion had been reduced to a handful, when nothing was left
of their flag but a rag, when their guns, the bullets all gone,
were no longer anything but clubs, when the heap of corpses was larger
than the group of survivors, there reigned among the conquerors,
around those men dying so sublimely, a sort of sacred terror,
and the English artillery, taking breath, became silent. This furnished
Les Miserables |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Dreams by Olive Schreiner: seed ground from which Heaven springs. He sees the sap ascending."
And I saw the figure bend over its work, and the light from its face fell
upon it.
And I said to God, "What is it making?"
And God said, "Music!"
And he touched my ears, and I heard it.
And after a long while I whispered to God, "This is Heaven."
And God asked me why I was crying. But I could not answer for joy.
And the face turned from its work, and the light fell upon me. Then it
grew so bright I could not see things separately; and which were God, or
the man, or I, I could not tell; we were all blended. I cried to God,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: rest of that science of unreason and unfact, against which Vesalius
had been fighting all his life, consciously or not, by using reason
and observing fact? What wonder if, in some burst of noble
indignation and just contempt, he forgot a moment that he had sold
his soul, and his love of science likewise, to be a luxurious, yet
uneasy, hanger-on at the tyrant's court; and spoke unadvisedly some
word worthy of a German man?
As to the story of his unhappy quarrels with his wife, there may be
a grain of truth in it likewise. Vesalius's religion must have sat
very lightly on him. The man who had robbed churchyards and gibbets
from his youth was not likely to be much afraid of apparitions and
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