| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Life of the Spider by J. Henri Fabre: The ultimate result is a sort of muff, a couple of inches high.
Bands of silk, supplied by the spinnerets, unite the pieces, so
that the whole resembles a coarse fabric. Without being absolutely
faultless, for there are always awkward pieces on the outside,
which the worker could not handle, the gaudy building is not devoid
of merit. The bird lining its nest would do no better. Whoso sees
the curious, many-coloured productions in my pans takes them for an
outcome of my industry, contrived with a view to some experimental
mischief; and his surprise is great when I confess who the real
author is. No one would ever believe the Spider capable of
constructing such a monument.
The Life of the Spider |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Bureaucracy by Honore de Balzac: to write a vaudeville, which was never finished. A thorough egoist, a
spendthrift and a miser in one,--that is to say, spending his money
solely on himself,--sharp, aggressive, and indiscreet, he did mischief
for mischief's sake; above all, he attacked the weak, respected
nothing and believed in nothing, neither in France, nor in God, nor in
art, nor in the Greeks, nor in the Turks, nor in the monarchy,--
insulting and disparaging everything that he could not comprehend. He
was the first to paint a black cap on Charles X.'s head on the five-
franc coins. He mimicked Dr. Gall when lecturing, till he made the
most starched of diplomatists burst their buttons. Famous for his
practical jokes, he varied them with such elaborate care that he
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: branch of thought. Originality is not their strong point. Their
utter ignorance of science shows this, and paradoxical as it may
seem, their art, in spite of its merit and its universality, does
the same. That art and imagination are necessarily bound together
receives no very forcible confirmation from a land where, nationally
speaking, at any rate, the first is easily first and the last easily
last, as nations go. It is to quite another quality that their
artistic excellence must be ascribed. That the Chinese and later
the Japanese have accomplished results at which the rest of the
world will yet live to marvel, is due to their--taste. But taste or
delicacy of perception has absolutely nothing to do with
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