| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: what they took. They simply inserted it upon the already existing
growth. There it remained, and throve, and blossomed, nourished by
that indigenous Japanese sap, taste. But like grafts generally,
the foreign boughs were not much modified by their new life-blood,
nor was the tree in its turn at all affected by them. Connected with
it only as separable parts of its structure, the cuttings might have
been lopped off again without influencing perceptibly the condition
of the foster-parent stem. The grafts in time grew to be great
branches, but the trunk remained through it all the trunk of a
sapling. In other words, the nation grew up to man's estate, keeping
the mind of its childhood.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Statesman by Plato: world was ordained to be the lord of his own progress, in like manner the
parts were ordained to grow and generate and give nourishment, as far as
they could, of themselves, impelled by a similar movement. And so we have
arrived at the real end of this discourse; for although there might be much
to tell of the lower animals, and of the condition out of which they
changed and of the causes of the change, about men there is not much, and
that little is more to the purpose. Deprived of the care of God, who had
possessed and tended them, they were left helpless and defenceless, and
were torn in pieces by the beasts, who were naturally fierce and had now
grown wild. And in the first ages they were still without skill or
resource; the food which once grew spontaneously had failed, and as yet
Statesman |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Puck of Pook's Hill by Rudyard Kipling: few godly Sussex ironmasters, a Bristow sailor lad, a
proud ass called Hal o' the Draft because, d'you see, he
was always drawing and drafting; and'- he dragged the
words slowly -'and a Scotch pirate.'
'Pirate?' said Dan. He wriggled like a hooked fish.
'Even that Andrew Barton you were singing of on
the stair just now.' He dipped again in the inkwell, and
held his breath over a sweeping line, as though he had
forgotten everything else.
'Pirates don't build churches, do they?' said Dan. 'Or
do they?'
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