| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, or Britain--were forming the imperial
life-guard of the Byzantine Emperor, as the once famous Varangers of
Constantinople; and that splendid epoch of their race was just
dawning, of which my lamented friend, the late Sir Edmund Head, says
so well in his preface to Viga Glum's Icelandic Saga, "The Sagas, of
which this tale is one, were composed for the men who have left
their mark in every corner of Europe; and whose language and laws
are at this moment important elements in the speech and institutions
of England, America, and Australia. There is no page of modern
history in which the influence of the Norsemen and their conquests
must not be taken into account--Russia, Constantinople, Greece,
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: always act very slowly, often only at long intervals of time, and generally
on only a very few of the inhabitants of the same region at the same time.
I further believe, that this very slow, intermittent action of natural
selection accords perfectly well with what geology tells us of the rate and
manner at which the inhabitants of this world have changed.
Slow though the process of selection may be, if feeble man can do much by
his powers of artificial selection, I can see no limit to the amount of
change, to the beauty and infinite complexity of the coadaptations between
all organic beings, one with another and with their physical conditions of
life, which may be effected in the long course of time by nature's power of
selection.
On the Origin of Species |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Modeste Mignon by Honore de Balzac: marked something positive and defined; where the poetry enthroned upon
an almost mystic brow seemed belied at times by the pleasure-loving
expression of the mouth; where candor claimed the depths profound and
varied of the eye, and disputed them with a spirit of irony that was
trained and educated,--from all these signs an observer would have
felt that this young girl, with the keen, alert ear that waked at
every sound, with a nostril open to catch the fragrance of the
celestial flower of the Ideal, was destined to be the battle-ground of
a struggle between the poesies of the dawn and the labors of the day;
between fancy and reality, the spirit and the life. Modeste was a pure
young girl, inquisitive after knowledge, understanding her destiny,
Modeste Mignon |
