| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: ornaments take care of themselves. What reasonable man ever
supposed that ornaments were something outward and in the skin
merely -- that the tortoise got his spotted shell, or the shell-fish
its mother-o'-pearl tints, by such a contract as the inhabitants of
Broadway their Trinity Church? But a man has no more to do with the
style of architecture of his house than a tortoise with that of its
shell: nor need the soldier be so idle as to try to paint the
precise color of his virtue on his standard. The enemy will find it
out. He may turn pale when the trial comes. This man seemed to me
to lean over the cornice, and timidly whisper his half truth to the
rude occupants who really knew it better than he. What of
Walden |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Magic of Oz by L. Frank Baum: tear you to pieces for treating me this way."
"P'raps," remarked Cap'n Bill, coolly, as he chopped at the logs,
"an' p'raps not. When are your folks comin' here?"
"I don't know," admitted the Kalidah. "But when they DO come, you
can't escape them."
"If they hold off long enough, I'll have my raft ready," said Cap'n Bill.
"What are you going to do with a raft?" inquired the beast.
"We're goin' over to that island, to get the Magic Flower."
The huge beast looked at him in surprise a moment, and then it began
to laugh. The laugh was a good deal like a roar, and it had a cruel
and derisive sound, but it was a laugh nevertheless.
The Magic of Oz |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Theaetetus by Plato: the rest of mankind in the use of a word. He had once hoped that by
getting rid of the solidity of matter he might open a passage to worlds
beyond. He liked to think of the world as the representation of the divine
nature, and delighted to imagine angels and spirits wandering through
space, present in the room in which he is sitting without coming through
the door, nowhere and everywhere at the same instant. At length he finds
that he has been the victim of his own fancies; he has neither more nor
less evidence of the supernatural than he had before. He himself has
become unsettled, but the laws of the world remain fixed as at the
beginning. He has discovered that his appeal to the fallibility of sense
was really an illusion. For whatever uncertainty there may be in the
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