The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: in love, or in hate, or in any other high passion, all their
days. When you see a dish of fruit at dessert, you sometimes
set your affections upon one particular peach or nectarine,
watch it with some anxiety as it comes round the table, and
feel quite a sensible disappointment when it is taken by some
one else. I have used the phrase "high passion." Well, I
should say this was about as high a passion as generally leads
to marriage. One husband hears after marriage that some poor
fellow is dying of his wife's love. "What a pity!" he
exclaims; "you know I could so easily have got another!" And
yet that is a very happy union. Or again: A young man was
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass: characteristic dread of offending the slaveholders, these poor,
white mechanics in Mr. Gardiner's ship-yard--instead of applying
the natural, honest remedy for the apprehended evil, and
objecting at once to work there by the side of slaves--made a
cowardly attack upon the free colored mechanics, saying _they_
were eating the bread which should be eaten by American freemen,
and swearing that they would not work with them. The feeling
was, _really_, against having their labor brought into
competition with that of the colored people at all; but it was
too much to strike directly at the interest of the slaveholders;
and, therefore proving their servility and cowardice they dealt
My Bondage and My Freedom |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Helen of Troy And Other Poems by Sara Teasdale: And all the lands that lie beneath the sun,
Till light turn darkness, and till time shall sleep,
Men's lives shall waste with longing after me,
For I shall be the sum of their desire,
The whole of beauty, never seen again.
And they shall stretch their arms and starting, wake
With "Helen!" on their lips, and in their eyes
The vision of me. Always I shall be
Limned on the darkness like a shaft of light
That glimmers and is gone. They shall behold
Each one his dream that fashions me anew; --
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