| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: the line of greatest breadth exactly at the point of greatest depth,
notwithstanding that the middle is so nearly level, the outline of
the pond far from regular, and the extreme length and breadth were
got by measuring into the coves; and I said to myself, Who knows but
this hint would conduct to the deepest part of the ocean as well as
of a pond or puddle? Is not this the rule also for the height of
mountains, regarded as the opposite of valleys? We know that a hill
is not highest at its narrowest part.
Of five coves, three, or all which had been sounded, were
observed to have a bar quite across their mouths and deeper water
within, so that the bay tended to be an expansion of water within
Walden |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from La Grenadiere by Honore de Balzac: are no undutiful children without undutiful mothers, for a child's
affection is always in proportion to the affection that it receives--
in early care, in the first words that it hears, in the response of
the eyes to which a child first looks for love and life. All these
things draw them closer to the mother or drive them apart. God lays
the child under the mother's heart, that she may learn that for a long
time to come her heart must be its home. And yet--there are mothers
cruelly slighted, mothers whose sublime, pathetic tenderness meets
only a harsh return, a hideous ingratitude which shows how difficult
it is to lay down hard-and-fast rules in matters of feeling.
Here, not one of all the thousand heart ties that bind child and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Land of Footprints by Stewart Edward White: shooting ability, and generally mess things up. Nevertheless, he
follows his master in, and he stands by. If the hunter fails, the
gunbearer will probably die. To me it is rather fine: for he does
it, not from the personal affection and loyalty which will carry
men far, but from a sheer sense of duty and pride of caste. The
quiet pride of the really good men, like Memba Sasa, is easy to
understand.
And the records are full of stories of the white man who has not
made good: of the coward who bolts, leaving his black man to take
the brunt of it, or who sticks but loses his head. Each new
employer must be very closely and interestedly scrutinized. In
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