| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells: science, of medicine and sanitation during the last century, when I
measure the increase in general education and average efficiency,
the power now available for human service, the merely physical
increment, and compare it with anything that has ever been at man's
disposal before, and when I think of what a little straggling,
incidental, undisciplined and uncoordinated minority of inventors,
experimenters, educators, writers and organisers has achieved this
development of human possibilities, achieved it in spite of the
disregard and aimlessness of the huge majority, and the passionate
resistance of the active dull, my imagination grows giddy with
dazzling intimations of the human splendours the justly organised
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: finished the score for the first Bayreuth festival in 1876 he had
turned 60. No wonder he had lost his old grip of it and left it
behind him. He even tampered with The Rhine Gold for the sake of
theatrical effect when stage-managing it, making Wotan pick up
and brandish a sword to give visible point to his sudden
inspiration as to the raising up of a hero. The sword had first
to be discovered by Fafnir among the Niblung treasures and thrown
away by him as useless. There is no sense in this device; and its
adoption shows the same recklessness as to the original intention
which we find in the music of the last act of The Dusk of the
Gods.*
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Lock and Key Library by Julian Hawthorne, Ed.: stalwart and tall, their vests brave with crimson and golden lace,
their weapons gayly gleaming with holiday silver. After them, the
Black Litter. As they came to the place, Ayesha, not raising her
head, spoke to them in her own Eastern tongue. A wail was her
answer. The armed men bounded forward, and the bearers left the
litter.
All gathered round the dead form with the face concealed under the
Black Veil; all knelt, and all wept. Far in the distance, at the
foot of the blue mountains, a crowd of the savage natives had risen
up as if from the earth; they stood motionless leaning on their
clubs and spears, and looking toward the spot on which we were--
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