| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Ballads by Robert Louis Stevenson: So on the grades of the terrace, in the ardent eye of the day,
The half-awake and the sleepers clustered and crawled and lay;
And loud as the dome of the bees, in the time of a swarming horde,
A horror of many insects hung in the air and roared.
Rua looked and wondered; he said to himself in his heart:
"Poor are the pleasures of life, and death is the better part."
But lo! on the higher benches a cluster of tranquil folk
Sat by themselves, nor raised their serious eyes, nor spoke:
Women with robes unruffled and garlands duly arranged,
Gazing far from the feast with faces of people estranged;
And quiet amongst the quiet, and fairer than all the fair,
Ballads |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: great or small, heavy or light, for the great will be small and the heavy
light--there is no single thing or quality, but out of motion and change
and admixture all things are becoming relatively to one another, which
'becoming' is by us incorrectly called being, but is really becoming, for
nothing ever is, but all things are becoming. Summon all philosophers--
Protagoras, Heracleitus, Empedocles, and the rest of them, one after
another, and with the exception of Parmenides they will agree with you in
this. Summon the great masters of either kind of poetry--Epicharmus, the
prince of Comedy, and Homer of Tragedy; when the latter sings of
'Ocean whence sprang the gods, and mother Tethys,'
does he not mean that all things are the offspring, of flux and motion?
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Melmoth Reconciled by Honore de Balzac: part in the reduction of bank clerks and porters to a state of idiocy.
A room with a stove in it is a retort in which the power of strong men
is evaporated, where their vitality is exhausted, and their wills
enfeebled. Government offices are part of a great scheme for the
manufacture of the mediocrity necessary for the maintenance of a
Feudal System on a pecuniary basis--and money is the foundation of the
Social Contract. (See Les Employes.) The mephitic vapors in the
atmosphere of a crowded room contribute in no small degree to bring
about a gradual deterioration of intelligences, the brain that gives
off the largest quantity of nitrogen asphyxiates the others, in the
long run.
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