| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Second Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln: insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war--
seeking to dissolve the Union, and divide effects, by negotiation.
Both parties deprecated war; but one of them would make war rather
than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather
than let it perish. And the war came.
One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed
generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it.
These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew
that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen,
perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the
insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed
Second Inaugural Address |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells: boy. He passed me, wishing me good night. I was minded to
speak to him, but did not. I answered his greeting with a
meaningless mumble and went on over the bridge.
Over the Maybury arch a train, a billowing tumult of
white, firelit smoke, and a long caterpillar of lighted windows,
went flying south--clatter, clatter, clap, rap, and it had gone.
A dim group of people talked in the gate of one of the houses
in the pretty little row of gables that was called Oriental
Terrace. It was all so real and so familiar. And that behind
me! It was frantic, fantastic! Such things, I told myself,
could not be.
War of the Worlds |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: we can; and, secondly, to do all the wholesome work for it we can,
and to spend all we can spare in doing all the sure good we can.
And sure good is, first in feeding people, then in dressing people,
then in lodging people, and lastly in rightly pleasing people, with
arts, or sciences, or any other subject of thought.
I say first in feeding; and, once for all, do not let yourselves be
deceived by any of the common talk of "indiscriminate charity." The
order to us is not to feed the deserving hungry, nor the industrious
hungry, nor the amiable and well-intentioned hungry, but simply to
feed the hungry. It is quite true, infallibly true, that if any man
will not work, neither should he eat--think of that, and every time
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