| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: bound about your feet by birth and old companionship and loyal love,
and bear your shovelful of phosphates to and fro, in town country,
until the hour of the great dissolvent.
Or, perhaps, you will keep to the cover. For the forest is by
itself, and forest life owns small kinship with life in the dismal
land of labour. Men are so far sophisticated that they cannot take
the world as it is given to them by the sight of their eyes. Not
only what they see and hear, but what they know to be behind, enter
into their notion of a place. If the sea, for instance, lie just
across the hills, sea-thoughts will come to them at intervals, and
the tenor of their dreams from time to time will suffer a sea-change.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Odyssey by Homer: Therewith he led the travel-worn stranger to the house. Now
when they came to the fair-lying palace, they laid aside
their mantles on the chairs and high seats, and went to the
polished baths, and bathed them. So when the maidens had
bathed them and anointed them with olive oil, and cast
about them thick mantles and doublets, they came forth from
the baths, and sat upon the seats. Then the handmaid bare
water for the hands in a goodly golden ewer, and poured it
forth over a silver basin to wash withal, and drew to their
side a polished table. And the grave dame bare wheaten
bread, and set it by them, and laid on the board many
The Odyssey |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde: already. You are not married to her already, and I don't think you
ever will be.
JACK. Why on earth do you say that?
ALGERNON. Well, in the first place girls never marry the men they
flirt with. Girls don't think it right.
JACK. Oh, that is nonsense!
ALGERNON. It isn't. It is a great truth. It accounts for the
extraordinary number of bachelors that one sees all over the place.
In the second place, I don't give my consent.
JACK. Your consent!
ALGERNON. My dear fellow, Gwendolen is my first cousin. And
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