| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Koran: Gardens of Eden which they shall enter, beneath them rivers flow;
therein shall they have what they please;- thus does God reward
those who fear Him.
To those whom the angels take off in a goodly state they shall
say, 'Peace be upon you! enter ye into Paradise for that which ye have
done.'
Do they expect other than that the angels should come to take them
off, or that thy Lord's bidding should come?- thus did those before
them; God did not wrong them; but it was themselves they wronged.
And the evil which they had done befel them, and that environed them
at which they used to mock!
The Koran |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis: it resembled a shoe, and being bored by this twentieth discovery that it
resembled a shoe. Lighting a cigarette; then, bound to the telephone with no
ashtray in reach, wondering what to do with this burning menace and anxiously
trying to toss it into the tiled bathroom. At last, on the telephone, "No
message, eh? All right, I'll call up again."
One afternoon he wandered through snow-rutted streets of which he had never
heard, streets of small tenements and two-family houses and marooned cottages.
It came to him that he had nothing to do, that there was nothing he wanted to
do. He was bleakly lonely in the evening, when he dined by himself at the
Regency Hotel. He sat in the lobby afterward, in a plush chair bedecked with
the Saxe-Coburg arms, lighting a cigar and looking for some one who would come
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: being an individual, may have culture, while the mob, being a
monster, has none. One who is an Emperor and King may stoop down
to pick up a brush for a painter, but when the democracy stoops
down it is merely to throw mud. And yet the democracy have not so
far to stoop as the emperor. In fact, when they want to throw mud
they have not to stoop at all. But there is no necessity to
separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad.
There are three kinds of despots. There is the despot who
tyrannises over the body. There is the despot who tyrannises over
the soul. There is the despot who tyrannises over the soul and
body alike. The first is called the Prince. The second is called
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