| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: from a succession of improved varieties, which will never have blended with
other individuals or varieties, but will have supplanted each other; so
that, at each successive stage of modification and improvement, all the
individuals of each variety will have descended from a single parent. But
in the majority of cases, namely, with all organisms which habitually unite
for each birth, or which often intercross, I believe that during the slow
process of modification the individuals of the species will have been kept
nearly uniform by intercrossing; so that many individuals will have gone on
simultaneously changing, and the whole amount of modification will not have
been due, at each stage, to descent from a single parent. To illustrate
what I mean: our English racehorses differ slightly from the horses of
On the Origin of Species |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Elixir of Life by Honore de Balzac: that we call a heart.
Don Juan the sceptic shut the flask again in the secret drawer in
the Gothic table--he meant to run no more risks of losing the
mysterious liquid.
Even at that solemn moment he heard the murmur of a crowd in the
gallery, a confused sound of voices, of stifled laughter and
light footfalls, and the rustling of silks--the sounds of a band
of revelers struggling for gravity. The door opened, and in came
the Prince and Don Juan's friends, the seven courtesans, and the
singers, disheveled and wild like dancers surprised by the dawn,
when the tapers that have burned through the night struggle with
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Children of the Night by Edwin Arlington Robinson: And oftentimes there crept into his ears
A sound of alien pity, touched with tears, --
And then (and only then) did Aaron laugh.
The Garden
There is a fenceless garden overgrown
With buds and blossoms and all sorts of leaves;
And once, among the roses and the sheaves,
The Gardener and I were there alone.
He led me to the plot where I had thrown
The fennel of my days on wasted ground,
And in that riot of sad weeds I found
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