| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: THE PYGMIES.
A great while ago, when the world was full of wonders, there
lived an earth-born Giant, named Antaeus, and a million or more
of curious little earth-born people, who were called Pygmies.
This Giant and these Pygmies being children of the same mother
(that is to say, our good old Grandmother Earth), were all
brethren, and dwelt together in a very friendly and
affectionate manner, far, far off, in the middle of hot Africa.
The Pygmies were so small, and there were so many sandy deserts
and such high mountains between them and the rest of mankind,
that nobody could get a peep at them oftener than once in a
Tanglewood Tales |
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: more complex characters, instead of having a simple musical label
attached to them, have their characteristic ideas and aspirations
identified with special representative themes as they come into
play in the drama; and the chief merit of the thematic structure
of The Ring is the mastery with which the dramatic play of the
ideas is reflected in the contrapuntal play of the themes. We do
not find Wotan, like the dragon or the horse, or, for the matter
of that, like the stage demon in Weber's Freischutz or
Meyerbeer's Robert the Devil, with one fixed theme attached to
him like a name plate to an umbrella, blaring unaltered from the
orchestra whenever he steps on the stage. Sometimes we have the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: possible a lofty standard, a pure ideal, instead of sinking to the
mere selfish standard which judges all things, even those of the
world to come, by profit and by loss, and into that sordid frame of
mind in which a man grows to believe that the world is constructed
of bricks and timber, and kept going by the price of stocks.
We are all tempted, and the easier and more prosperous we are, the
more we are tempted, to fall into that sordid and shallow frame of
mind. Sordid even when its projects are most daring, its outward
luxuries most refined; and shallow, even when most acute, when
priding itself most on its knowledge of human nature, and of the
secret springs which, so it dreams, move the actions and make the
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