| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: the domestic cat. The child should have its first coming of age when
it is weaned, another when it can talk, another when it can walk,
another when it can dress itself without assistance; and when it can
read, write, count money, and pass an examination in going a simple
errand involving a purchase and a journey by rail or other public
method of locomotion, it should have quite a majority. At present the
children of laborers are soon mobile and able to shift for themselves,
whereas it is possible to find grown-up women in the rich classes who
are actually afraid to take a walk in the streets unattended and
unprotected. It is true that this is a superstition from the time
when a retinue was part of the state of persons of quality, and the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain: "Yassir, you bet it did!"
"Well, I declare! Why, how did that happen?"
"Happened dis-away. I 'uz a-sett'n' here kinder dozin' in de dark,
en _che-bang!_ goes a gun, right out dah. I skips along out towards
t'other end o' de house to see what's gwine on, en stops by de ole winder
on de side towards Pudd'nhead Wilson's house dat ain't got no sash in it--
but dey ain't none of 'em got any sashes, for as dat's concerned--
en I stood dah in de dark en look out, en dar in the moonlight,
right down under me 'uz one o' de twins a-cussin'--not much,
but jist a-cussin' soft--it 'uz de brown one dat 'uz cussin,'
'ca'se he 'uz hit in de shoulder. En Doctor Claypool he 'uz
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Bureaucracy by Honore de Balzac: question of laws,--namely, a disquisition in which the reasons for and
against are stated with more or less partiality. No real result is
attained; the minister, like the Chamber, is fully as well prepared
before as after the report is rendered. A determination, in whatever
matter, is reached in an instant. Do what we will, the moment comes
when the decision must be made. The greater the array of reasons for
and against, the less sound will be the judgment. The finest things of
which France can boast have been accomplished without reports and
where decisions were prompt and spontaneous. The dominant law of a
statesman is to apply precise formula to all cases, after the manner
of judges and physicians.
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