| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: the dasher of a churn in the midst of the other vital arrangements,
at every step of a trotting horse. The brains also are shaken up
like coppers in a money-box. Riding is good, for those that are
born with a silver-mounted bridle in their hand, and can ride as
much and as often as they like, without thinking all the time they
hear that steady grinding sound as the horse's jaws triturate with
calm lateral movement the bank-bills and promises to pay upon which
it is notorious that the profligate animal in question feeds day
and night.
Instead, however, of considering these kinds of exercise in this
empirical way, I will devote a brief space to an examination of
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: As Christianity came in, and the eating of horse-flesh was forbidden
as impiety by the Church, while his oracles dwindled down to such as
that which Falada's dead head gives to the goose-girl in the German
tale, the magic power of the horse figured only in ballads and
legends: but his real power remained.
The art of riding became an hereditary and exclusive science--at
last a pedantry, hampered by absurd etiquettes, and worse than
useless traditions; but the power and right to ride remained on the
whole the mark of the dominant caste. Terribly did they often abuse
that special power. The faculty of making a horse carry him no more
makes a man a good man, than the faculties of making money, making
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce: intelligence that sees in an exception a proof of the rule the wisdom
of an act is judged by the outcome, the result. This is immortal
nonsense; the wisdom of an act is to be juded by the light that the
doer had when he performed it.
OUTDO, v.t. To make an enemy.
OUT-OF-DOORS, n. That part of one's environment upon which no
government has been able to collect taxes. Chiefly useful to inspire
poets.
I climbed to the top of a mountain one day
To see the sun setting in glory,
And I thought, as I looked at his vanishing ray,
The Devil's Dictionary |
