| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Confessio Amantis by John Gower: Which to the Sonne and Mone is leid; 2570
For to the rede and to the whyte
This Ston hath pouer to profite.
It makth mulptiplicacioun
Of gold, and the fixacioun
It causeth, and of his habit
He doth the werk to be parfit
Of thilke Elixer which men calle
Alconomie, as is befalle
To hem that whilom weren wise.
Bot now it stant al otherwise; 2580
Confessio Amantis |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Iliad by Homer: all times valorous, and wherever there has been hard fighting
have held my own among the foremost. There may be those among the
Achaeans who do not know how I fight, but you know it well enough
yourself."
Idomeneus answered, "I know you for a brave man: you need not
tell me. If the best men at the ships were being chosen to go on
an ambush--and there is nothing like this for showing what a man
is made of; it comes out then who is cowardly and who brave; the
coward will change colour at every touch and turn; he is full of
fears, and keeps shifting his weight first on one knee and then
on the other; his heart beats fast as he thinks of death, and one
The Iliad |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Father Damien by Robert Louis Stevenson: pick out the leper station on a map; you will be able to judge how
much of Molokai is thus cut off between the surf and precipice,
whether less than a half, or less than a quarter, or a fifth, or a
tenth - or, say a twentieth; and the next time you burst into print
you will be in a position to share with us the issue of your
calculations.
I imagine you to be one of those persons who talk with cheerfulness
of that place which oxen and wain-ropes could not drag you to
behold. You, who do not even know its situation on the map,
probably denounce sensational descriptions, stretching your limbs
the while in your pleasant parlour on Beretania Street. When I was
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