| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: freedom and Laodicean tolerance of Kingship, and not in the
Calvinistic bigotry and pedantry of Marxism.
Why, then, you may ask, do I say that I am bound to Germany by
the ties that hold my nature most strongly? Very simply because I
should have perished of despair in my youth but for the world
created for me by that great German dynasty which began with Bach
and will perhaps not end with Richard Strauss. Do not suppose for
a moment that I learnt my art from English men of letters. True,
they showed me how to handle English words; but if I had known no
more than that, my works would never have crossed the Channel. My
masters were the masters of a universal language: they were, to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from New Arabian Nights by Robert Louis Stevenson: appearance, untenanted. He drew a long breath. Here he was, home
again in safety, and this should be his last folly as certainly as
it had been his first. The matches stood on a little table by the
bed, and he began to grope his way in that direction. As he moved,
his apprehensions grew upon him once more, and he was pleased, when
his foot encountered an obstacle, to find it nothing more alarming
than a chair. At last he touched curtains. From the position of
the window, which was faintly visible, he knew he must be at the
foot of the bed, and had only to feel his way along it in order to
reach the table in question.
He lowered his hand, but what it touched was not simply a
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lin McLean by Owen Wister: this adventure. The ditches froze and filled with snow, through which the
sordid gravel heaps showed in a dreary fashion; so the two friends
drifted southward.
Near the small new town of Mesa, Arizona, they sat down again in the
dirt. It was milder here, and, when the sun shone, never quite froze. But
this part of Arizona is scarcely more grateful to the eye than Nevada.
Moreover, Lin and Honey found no gold at all. Some men near them found a
little. Then in January, even though the sun shone, it quite froze one
day.
"We're seein' the country, anyway," said Honey.
"Seein' hell," said Lin, "and there's more of it above ground than I
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