| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Hero of Our Time by M.Y. Lermontov: later, one fine morning, I shall die."
"I am better off than you," I said. "In addi-
tion to that, I have a further conviction, namely,
that, one very nasty evening, I had the misfor-
tune to be born."
All the others considered that we were talking
nonsense, but indeed not one of them said any-
thing more sensible. From that moment we
singled each other out amongst the crowd. We
used frequently to meet and discuss abstract
subjects in a very serious manner, until each
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: But how do the poor minority fare? Perhaps it will be found
that just in proportion as some have been placed in outward
circumstances above the savage, others have been degraded below him.
The luxury of one class is counterbalanced by the indigence of
another. On the one side is the palace, on the other are the
almshouse and "silent poor." The myriads who built the pyramids to
be the tombs of the Pharaohs were fed on garlic, and it may be were
not decently buried themselves. The mason who finishes the cornice
of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut not so good as a
wigwam. It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the
usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large
Walden |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: their childhood was the poetry of Homer, and not of--But I am
treading on dangerous ground. It was for this that the seafaring
Greek lad was taught to find his ideal in Ulysses; while his
sister at home found hers, it may be, in Nausicaa. It was for
this, that when perhaps the most complete and exquisite of all the
Greeks, Sophocles the good, beloved by gods and men, represented
on the Athenian stage his drama of Nausicaa, and, as usual, could
not--for he had no voice--himself take a speaking part, he was
content to do one thing in which he specially excelled; and
dressed and masked as a girl, to play at ball amid the chorus of
Nausicaa's maidens.
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