| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: secured by deliberately filling them with prejudices and
practicing on their imaginations by pageantry and artificial
eminences and dignities. The government is of course established
by the few who are capable of government, though its mechanism
once complete, it may be, and generally is, carried on
unintelligently by people who are incapable of it the capable
people repairing it from time to time when it gets too far behind
the continuous advance or decay of civilization. All these
capable people are thus in the position of Wotan, forced to
maintain as sacred, and themselves submit to, laws which they
privately know to be obsolescent makeshifts, and to affect the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Silverado Squatters by Robert Louis Stevenson: indeed, few birds, and none that had much of a voice or
anything worthy to be called a song. My morning comrade had
a thin chirp, unmusical and monotonous, but friendly and
pleasant to hear. He had but one rival: a fellow with an
ostentatious cry of near an octave descending, not one note
of which properly followed another. This is the only bird I
ever knew with a wrong ear; but there was something
enthralling about his performance. You listened and
listened, thinking each time he must surely get it right; but
no, it was always wrong, and always wrong the same way. Yet
he seemed proud of his song, delivered it with execution and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from New Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson: On which life's daylight darkens, shade by shade.
And still, with hopes decreasing, griefs increased,
Still, with what wit I have shall I, for one,
Keep open, at the annual feast,
The puppet-booth of fun.
I care not if the wit be poor,
The old worn motley stained with rain and tears,
If but the courage still endure
That filled and strengthened hope in earlier years;
If still, with friends averted, fate severe,
A glad, untainted cheerfulness be mine
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