| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: good comradeship. Now they got on the westbound train one morning,
in their Sunday clothes, with their oilcloth valises--and I
never saw them again. Months afterward we got a card from Otto,
saying that Jake had been down with mountain fever, but now they
were both working in the Yankee Girl Mine, and were doing well.
I wrote to them at that address, but my letter was returned to me,
`Unclaimed.' After that we never heard from them.
Black Hawk, the new world in which we had come to live,
was a clean, well-planted little prairie town, with white fences
and good green yards about the dwellings, wide, dusty streets,
and shapely little trees growing along the wooden sidewalks.
My Antonia |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche: constrained, blinking eyes, depressed hearts, and the false submissive
style, which kisseth with broad cowardly lips.
And spurious wisdom: so doth it call all the wit that slaves, and hoary-
headed and weary ones affect; and especially all the cunning, spurious-
witted, curious-witted foolishness of priests!
The spurious wise, however, all the priests, the world-weary, and those
whose souls are of feminine and servile nature--oh, how hath their game all
along abused selfishness!
And precisely THAT was to be virtue and was to be called virtue--to abuse
selfishness! And "selfless"--so did they wish themselves with good reason,
all those world-weary cowards and cross-spiders!
Thus Spake Zarathustra |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: publish her speech.
MENEXENUS: Nay, Socrates, let us have the speech, whether Aspasia's or any
one else's, no matter. I hope that you will oblige me.
SOCRATES: But I am afraid that you will laugh at me if I continue the
games of youth in old age.
MENEXENUS: Far otherwise, Socrates; let us by all means have the speech.
SOCRATES: Truly I have such a disposition to oblige you, that if you bid
me dance naked I should not like to refuse, since we are alone. Listen
then: If I remember rightly, she began as follows, with the mention of the
dead:-- (Thucyd.)
There is a tribute of deeds and of words. The departed have already had
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