| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Collected Articles by Frederick Douglass: of the troubled sea, surged to and fro between the lofty walls of Broadway.
Though dazzled with the wonders which met me on every hand, my thoughts
could not be much withdrawn from my strange situation. For the moment,
the dreams of my youth and the hopes of my manhood were completely fulfilled.
The bonds that had held me to "old master" were broken. No man now
had a right to call me his slave or assert mastery over me. I was
in the rough and tumble of an outdoor world, to take my chance with
the rest of its busy number. I have often been asked how I felt
when first I found myself on free soil. There is scarcely anything
in my experience about which I could not give a more satisfactory answer.
A new world had opened upon me. If life is more than breath and the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from In Darkest England and The Way Out by General William Booth: Whitechapel of New York.
Twenty-four hours in the slums--just a night and a day--
yet into them were crowded such revelations of misery, depravity,
and degradation as having once been gazed upon life can never be the
same afterwards. Around and above his blighted neighbourhood flows
the tide of active, prosperous life. Men and women travel past in
street cars by the Elevated Railroad and across the bridge,
and take no thought of its wretchedness, of the criminals bred there,
and of the disease engendered by its foulness. It is a fearful menace
to the public health, both moral and physical, yet the multitude is as
heedless of danger as the peasant who makes his house and plants green
In Darkest England and The Way Out |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Seraphita by Honore de Balzac: that science still knows no way of gauging the changes produced by the
flux and reflux of substances which come and go across your crystals
and your instruments on the impalpable filaments of heat or light
conducted and projected by the affinities of metal or vitrified flint.
You obtain none but dead substances, from which you have driven the
unknown force that holds in check the decomposition of all things here
below, and of which cohesion, attraction, vibration, and polarity are
but phenomena. Life is the thought of substances; bodies are only the
means of fixing life and holding it to its way. If bodies were beings
living of themselves they would be Cause itself, and could not die.
"When a man discovers the results of the general movement, which is
Seraphita |
