| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from What is Man? by Mark Twain: mistake. It is in his chameleonship that his greatest good
fortune lies. He has only to change his habitat--his
ASSOCIATIONS. But the impulse to do it must come from the
OUTSIDE--he cannot originate it himself, with that purpose in
view. Sometimes a very small and accidental thing can furnish
him the initiatory impulse and start him on a new road, with a
new idea. The chance remark of a sweetheart, "I hear that you
are a coward," may water a seed that shall sprout and bloom and
flourish, and ended in producing a surprising fruitage--in the
fields of war. The history of man is full of such accidents.
The accident of a broken leg brought a profane and ribald soldier
What is Man? |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Mucker by Edgar Rice Burroughs: upon the opposite side of the river a little party of silent
horsemen filed downward to the ford. At the bluff's foot a
barbed-wire fence marked the eastern boundary of the ranch's
enclosed fields. The foremost horseman dismounted and cut
the strands of wire, carrying them to one side from the path
of the feet of the horses which now passed through the
opening he had made.
Down into the river they rode following the ford even in the
darkness with an assurance which indicated long familiarity.
Then through a fringe of willows out across a meadow
toward the ranch buildings the riders made their way. The
The Mucker |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn: strange and old, illumined by a sunshine soft as memory.
...What I have thus been trying to describe is a kakemono,-- that is to
say, a Japanese painting on silk, suspended to the wall of my alcove;-- and
the name of it is Shinkiro, which signifies "Mirage." But the shapes of the
mirage are unmistakable. Those are the glimmering portals of Horai the
blest; and those are the moony roofs of the Palace of the Dragon-King;--
and the fashion of them (though limned by a Japanese brush of to-day) is
the fashion of things Chinese, twenty-one hundred years ago...
Thus much is told of the place in the Chinese books of that time:--
In Horai there is neither death nor pain; and there is no winter. The
flowers in that place never fade, and the fruits never fail; and if a man
Kwaidan |
