| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Verses 1889-1896 by Rudyard Kipling: And Mac'll pay you the money as soon as the bubbles break!
Five thousand for six weeks' cruising, the staunchest freighter afloat,
And Mac he'll give you your bonus the minute I'm out o' the boat!
He'll take you round to Macassar, and you'll come back alone;
He knows what I want o' the ~Mary~. . . . I'll do what I please with my own.
Your mother 'ud call it wasteful, but I've seven-and-thirty more;
I'll come in my private carriage and bid it wait at the door. . . .
For my son 'e was never a credit: 'e muddled with books and art,
And 'e lived on Sir Anthony's money and 'e broke Sir Anthony's heart.
There isn't even a grandchild, and the Gloster family's done --
The only one you left me, O mother, the only one!
Verses 1889-1896 |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac: used cold water in her bath, and, like her again, the Marquise slept
on a horse-hair mattress, with morocco-covered pillows to preserve her
hair; she ate very little, only drank water, and observed monastic
regularity in the smallest actions of her life.
This severe system has, it is said, been carried so far as to the use
of ice instead of water, and nothing but cold food, by a famous Polish
lady of our day who spends a life, now verging on a century old, after
the fashion of a town belle. Fated to live as long as Marion Delorme,
whom history has credited with surviving to be a hundred and thirty,
the old vice-queen of Poland, at the age of nearly a hundred, has the
heart and brain of youth, a charming face, an elegant shape; and in
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: the world at large, is still in the future,--still to be remotely
hoped for. The rich complexity of modern social achievement is
attained at the cost of individual many-sidedness. As Tennyson
puts it, "The individual withers and the world is more and more."
Yet the individual does not exist for the sake of society, as the
positivists would have us believe, but society exists for the
sake of the individual. And the test of complete social life is
the opportunity which it affords for complete individual life.
Tried by this test, our contemporary civilization will appear
seriously defective,--excellent only as a preparation for
something better.
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
