| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: By his wicked wiles and cunning,
When he from the moon descended,
When he came on earth to seek me.
He, the mightiest of Magicians,
Sends the fever from the marshes,
Sends the pestilential vapors,
Sends the poisonous exhalations,
Sends the white fog from the fen-lands,
Sends disease and death among us!
"Take your bow, O Hiawatha,
Take your arrows, jasper-headed,
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Almayer's Folly by Joseph Conrad: delight and all its fear.
He must have been able to join his brig in time, after all, and
found much occupation outside, for it was in vain that Almayer
looked for his friend's speedy return. The lower reach of the
river where he so often and so impatiently directed his eyes
remained deserted, save for the rapid flitting of some fishing
canoe; but down the upper reaches came black clouds and heavy
showers heralding the final setting in of the rainy season with
its thunderstorms and great floods making the river almost
impossible of ascent for native canoes.
Almayer, strolling along the muddy beach between his houses,
Almayer's Folly |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Reason Discourse by Rene Descartes: precepts are of avail- rather in the communication of what we already
know, or even as the art of Lully, in speaking without judgment of things
of which we are ignorant, than in the investigation of the unknown; and
although this science contains indeed a number of correct and very
excellent precepts, there are, nevertheless, so many others, and these
either injurious or superfluous, mingled with the former, that it is
almost quite as difficult to effect a severance of the true from the false
as it is to extract a Diana or a Minerva from a rough block of marble.
Then as to the analysis of the ancients and the algebra of the moderns,
besides that they embrace only matters highly abstract, and, to
appearance, of no use, the former is so exclusively restricted to the
Reason Discourse |
