| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Dream Life and Real Life by Olive Schreiner: and came to an overhanging bank, under which, sitting on the red sand, were
two men. One was a tiny, ragged, old bushman, four feet high; the other
was an English navvy, in a dark blue blouse. They cut the kid's throat
with the navvy's long knife, and covered up the blood with sand, and buried
the entrails and skin. Then they talked, and quarrelled a little; and then
they talked quietly again.
The Hottentot man put a leg of the kid under his coat and left the rest of
the meat for the two in the sluit, and walked away.
When little Jannita awoke it was almost sunset. She sat up very
frightened, but her goats were all about her. She began to drive them
home. "I do not think there are any lost," she said.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tao Teh King by Lao-tze: 2. Therefore the sage holds in his embrace the one thing (of
humility), and manifests it to all the world. He is free from self-
display, and therefore he shines; from self-assertion, and therefore
he is distinguished; from self-boasting, and therefore his merit is
acknowledged; from self-complacency, and therefore he acquires
superiority. It is because he is thus free from striving that
therefore no one in the world is able to strive with him.
3. That saying of the ancients that 'the partial becomes complete' was
not vainly spoken:--all real completion is comprehended under it.
23. 1. Abstaining from speech marks him who is obeying the spontaneity
of his nature. A violent wind does not last for a whole morning; a
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: them the distemper, and infect or endanger them. If, then, there were
cases wherein the infected people were careless of the injury they did
to others, this was certainly one of them, if not the chief, namely,
when people who had the distemper had broken out from houses which were
so shut up, and having been driven to extremities for provision
or for entertainment, had endeavoured to conceal their condition,
and have been thereby instrumental involuntarily to infect others
who have been ignorant and unwary.
This is one of the reasons why I believed then, and do believe still,
that the shutting up houses thus by force, and restraining, or rather
imprisoning, people in their own houses, as I said above, was of little
A Journal of the Plague Year |
