| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Long Odds by H. Rider Haggard: left England, accompanied by two companions, his old fellow-voyagers,
Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good, and has now utterly vanished into the
dark heart of Africa. He is persuaded that a white people, of which he
has heard rumours all his life, exists somewhere on the highlands in the
vast, still unexplored interior, and his great ambition is to find them
before he dies. This is the wild quest upon which he and his companions
have departed, and from which I shrewdly suspect they never will return.
One letter only have I received from the old gentleman, dated from a
mission station high up the Tana, a river on the east coast, about three
hundred miles north of Zanzibar. In it he says that they have gone
through many hardships and adventures, but are alive and well, and have
Long Odds |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx: is but a means to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence
of the labourer.
In bourgeois society, therefore, the past dominates the present;
in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In
bourgeois society capital is independent and has individuality,
while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.
And the abolition of this state of things is called by the
bourgeois,
abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The
abolition
of bourgeois individuality, bourgeois independence, and bourgeois
The Communist Manifesto |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Options by O. Henry: But while I worked he cheered me with the expression of great thoughts
handed down from the dead ones of old. He quoted some translations
from the Greek at much length.
"Anacreon," he explained. "That was a favorite passage with Miss
Mangum--as I recited it."
"She is meant for higher things," said I, repeating his phrase.
"Can there be anything higher," asked Goodloe, "than to dwell in the
society of the classics, to live in the atmosphere of learning and
culture? You have often decried education. What of your wasted
efforts through your ignorance of simple mathematics? How soon would
you have found your treasure if my knowledge had not shown you your
Options |
