| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: the proximity of the two areas,--unless, indeed, it be assumed that an
isthmus separated two seas inhabited by distinct, but contemporaneous,
faunas. Lyell has made similar observations on some of the later tertiary
formations. Barrande, also, shows that there is a striking general
parallelism in the successive Silurian deposits of Bohemia and Scandinavia;
nevertheless he finds a surprising amount of difference in the species. If
the several formations in these regions have not been deposited during the
same exact periods,--a formation in one region often corresponding with a
blank interval in the other,--and if in both regions the species have gone
on slowly changing during the accumulation of the several formations and
during the long intervals of time between them; in this case, the several
On the Origin of Species |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain: gate with a tin pail, and singing Buffalo Gals. Bringing
water from the town pump had always been hateful
work in Tom's eyes, before, but now it did not strike
him so. He remembered that there was company
at the pump. White, mulatto, and negro boys and
girls were always there waiting their turns, resting,
trading playthings, quarrelling, fighting, skylarking.
And he remembered that although the pump was only
a hundred and fifty yards off, Jim never got back with
a bucket of water under an hour -- and even then some-
body generally had to go after him. Tom said:
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: industrial system. The school is a prison in which work is a
punishment and a curse. In avowed prisons, hard labor, the only
alleviation of a prisoner's lot, is treated as an aggravation of his
punishment; and everything possible is done to intensify the
prisoner's inculcated and unnatural notion that work is an evil. In
industry we are overworked and underfed prisoners. Under such absurd
circumstances our judgment of things becomes as perverted as our
habits. If we were habitually underworked and overfed, our notion of
heaven would be a place where everybody worked strenuously for
twenty-four hours a day and never got anything to eat.
Once realize that a perpetual holiday is beyond human endurance, and
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