| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: cattle, or hired men or boys, or improved implements of husbandry, I
was much slower, and became much more intimate with my beans than
usual. But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of
drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness. It has a
constant and imperishable moral, and to the scholar it yields a
classic result. A very agricola laboriosus was I to travellers
bound westward through Lincoln and Wayland to nobody knows where;
they sitting at their ease in gigs, with elbows on knees, and reins
loosely hanging in festoons; I the home-staying, laborious native of
the soil. But soon my homestead was out of their sight and thought.
It was the only open and cultivated field for a great distance on
Walden |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson: Innocent and honest children.
Happy hearts and happy faces,
Happy play in grassy places--
That was how in ancient ages,
Children grew to kings and sages.
But the unkind and the unruly,
And the sort who eat unduly,
They must never hope for glory--
Theirs is quite a different story!
Cruel children, crying babies,
All grow up as geese and gabies,
A Child's Garden of Verses |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: himself in soul as well as body, and of all things in heaven and earth with
one another.
Aristophanes is ready to laugh and make laugh before he opens his mouth,
just as Socrates, true to his character, is ready to argue before he begins
to speak. He expresses the very genius of the old comedy, its coarse and
forcible imagery, and the licence of its language in speaking about the
gods. He has no sophistical notions about love, which is brought back by
him to its common-sense meaning of love between intelligent beings. His
account of the origin of the sexes has the greatest (comic) probability and
verisimilitude. Nothing in Aristophanes is more truly Aristophanic than
the description of the human monster whirling round on four arms and four
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