| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: was the art of Raphael that received his fleeting suffrages;
and with the aid of pen and ink and a shilling box of water
colours, he had soon turned one of the rooms into a picture
gallery. My more immediate duty towards the gallery was to
be showman; but I would sometimes unbend a little, join the
artist (so to speak) at the easel, and pass the afternoon
with him in a generous emulation, making coloured drawings.
On one of these occasions, I made the map of an island; it
was elaborately and (I thought) beautifully coloured; the
shape of it took my fancy beyond expression; it contained
harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and with the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Anthem by Ayn Rand: that we would. Only we do not know why
such thought came to us, for these ugly
matters bear no relation to us and the
Golden One. What relation can they bear?
Still, without reason, as we stood there
by the hedge, we felt our lips drawn tight
with hatred, a sudden hatred for all our
brother men. And the Golden One saw it
and smiled slowly, and there was in their
smile the first sadness we had seen in them.
We think that in the wisdom of women
Anthem |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: over the thought of number, reminding ourselves that every unit both
implies and denies the existence of every other, and that the one is many--
a sum of fractions, and the many one--a sum of units. We may be reminded
that in nature there is a centripetal as well as a centrifugal force, a
regulator as well as a spring, a law of attraction as well as of repulsion.
The way to the West is the way also to the East; the north pole of the
magnet cannot be divided from the south pole; two minus signs make a plus
in Arithmetic and Algebra. Again, we may liken the successive layers of
thought to the deposits of geological strata which were once fluid and are
now solid, which were at one time uppermost in the series and are now
hidden in the earth; or to the successive rinds or barks of trees which
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