| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Verses 1889-1896 by Rudyard Kipling: Of trailing moss, and plaited straw for crown.
And all the village praised him for this craft,
And brought him butter, honey, milk, and curds.
Wherefore, because the shoutings drove him mad,
He scratched upon that log: "~Thus Gods are made,
And whoso makes them otherwise shall die.~"
And all the people praised him. . . . Then he died.
~Read here the story of Evarra -- man --
Maker of Gods in lands beyond the sea.~
Because his God decreed one clot of blood
Verses 1889-1896 |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: edge of the offing. She emerged rapidly to her water-line and
came on steadily, a slim hull with a long streak of smoke
slanting away from the rising sun. We embarked in a hurry, and
headed the boat out for our prey, but we hardly moved three miles
an hour.
She was a big, high-class cargo-steamer of a type that is to be
met on the sea no more--black hull, with low, white
superstructures, powerfully rigged with three masts and a lot of
yards on the fore; two hands at her enormous wheel--steam
steering-gear was not a matter of course in these days--and with
them on the bridge three others, bulky in thick blue jackets,
A Personal Record |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Polity of Athenians and Lacedaemonians by Xenophon: him who openly neglected to make himself as good as possible? For
this, it seems, was his principle: in the one case, where a man is
robbed, or defrauded, or kidnapped, and made a slave of, the injury of
the misdeed, whatever it be, is personal to the individual so
maltreated; but in the other case whole communities suffer foul
treason at the hands of the base man and the coward. So that it was
only reasonable, in my opinion, that he should visit the heaviest
penalty upon these latter.
Moreover, he laid upon them, like some irresistible necessity, the
obligation to cultivate the whole virtue of a citizen. Provided they
duly performed the injunctions of the law, the city belonged to them,
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