| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from What is Man? by Mark Twain: circumstances; wherefore my book-education came to a standstill
forever, and I became a printer's apprentice, on board and
clothes, and when the clothes failed I got a hymn-book in place
of them. This for summer wear, probably. I lived in Hannibal
fifteen and a half years, altogether, then ran away, according to
the custom of persons who are intending to become celebrated. I
never lived there afterward. Four years later I became a "cub"
on a Mississippi steamboat in the St. Louis and New Orleans
trade, and after a year and a half of hard study and hard work
the U.S. inspectors rigorously examined me through a couple of
long sittings and decided that I knew every inch of the
What is Man? |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: me, meeting another subject, produce the same, or become similar, for that
too would produce another result from another subject, and become
different.
THEAETETUS: True.
SOCRATES: Neither can I by myself, have this sensation, nor the object by
itself, this quality.
THEAETETUS: Certainly not.
SOCRATES: When I perceive I must become percipient of something--there can
be no such thing as perceiving and perceiving nothing; the object, whether
it become sweet, bitter, or of any other quality, must have relation to a
percipient; nothing can become sweet which is sweet to no one.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: boring for them with iron rods armed with a screw, and taking them
in to sell in Torquay market, as excellent food. But there is one,
at last - a grey disc pouting up through the sand. Touch it, and
it is gone down, quick as light. We must dig it out, and
carefully, for it is a delicate monster. At last, after ten
minutes' careful work, we have brought up, from a foot depth or
more - what? A thick, dirty, slimy worm, without head or tail,
form or colour. A slug has more artistic beauty about him. Be it
so. At home in the aquarium (where, alas! he will live but for a
day or two, under the new irritation of light) he will make a very
different figure. That is one of the rarest of British sea-
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