| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Enemies of Books by William Blades: Its head appears bigg and blunt, and its body tapers from it
towards the tail, smaller and smaller, being shap'd almost like a
carret. . . . It has two long horns before, which are streight,
and tapering towards the top, curiously ring'd or knobb'd and
brisled much like the marsh weed called Horses tail. . . . The
hinder part is terminated with three tails, in every particular
resembling the two longer horns that grow out of the head.
The legs are scal'd and hair'd. This animal probably feeds upon
the paper and covers of books, and perforates in them several
small round holes, finding perhaps a convenient nourishment
in those husks of hemp and flax, which have passed through so
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Montezuma's Daughter by H. Rider Haggard: though at that moment within myself I felt more of a fool than I
had ever been before.
And now men appeared, grave and reverend in appearance, bearing
lutes in their hands. I was told that these were my tutors, and
with them a train of royal pages who were to be my servants. They
led me forth from the hall making music as they went, and before me
marched a herald, calling out that this was the god Tezcat, Soul of
the World, Creator of the World, who had come again to visit his
people. They led me through all the courts and endless chambers of
the palace, and wherever I went, man woman and child bowed
themselves to the earth before me, and worshipped me, Thomas
Montezuma's Daughter |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: seek. Impersonality, by lessening the interest in one's self,
induces one to take an interest in others. Introspection tends to
make of man a solitary animal, the absence of it a social one.
The more impersonal the people, the more will the community supplant
the individual in the popular estimation. The type becomes the
interesting thing to man, as it always is to nature. Then, as the
social desires develop, politeness, being the means to their
enjoyment, develops also.
A second omission in Japanese etymology is that of gender. That
words should be credited with sex is a verbal anthropomorphism that
would seem to a Japanese exquisitely grotesque, if so be that it did
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