| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: went likewise. All prospered in the new Temple of the Muses for a
year or so. Then its high-priest, Govea, died; and, by a peripeteia
too common in those days and countries, Buchanan and two of his
friends migrated unwillingly from the Temple of the Muses for that
of Moloch, and found themselves in the Inquisition.
Buchanan, it seems, had said that St. Augustine was more of a
Lutheran than a Catholic on the question of the mass. He and his
friends had eaten flesh in Lent; which, he says, almost everyone in
Spain did. But he was suspected, and with reason, as a heretic; the
Gray Friars formed but one brotherhood throughout Europe; and news
among them travelled surely if not fast, so that the story of the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Red Inn by Honore de Balzac: had disappeared. The dessert was like a squadron after a battle: all
the dishes were disabled, pillaged, damaged; several were wandering
around the table, in spite of the efforts of the mistress of the house
to keep them in their places. Some of the persons present were gazing
at pictures of Swiss scenery, symmetrically hung upon the gray-toned
walls of the dining-room. Not a single guest was bored; in fact, I
never yet knew a man who was sad during his digestion of a good
dinner. We like at such moments to remain in quietude, a species of
middle ground between the reverie of a thinker and the comfort of the
ruminating animals; a condition which we may call the material
melancholy of gastronomy.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau: it my money? It may be in a great strait, and not know what
to do: I cannot help that. It must help itself; do as I do.
It is not worth the while to snivel about it. I am not
responsible for the successful working of the machinery of
society. I am not the son of the engineer. I perceive
that, when an acorn and a chestnut fall side by side, the
one does not remain inert to make way for the other, but
both obey their own laws, and spring and grow and flourish
as best they can, till one, perchance, overshadows and
destroys the other. If a plant cannot live according to
nature, it dies; and so a man.
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience |
