| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane: At one part of the line four men had been
swooped upon, and they now sat as prisoners.
Some blue men were about them in an eager and
curious circle. The soldiers had trapped strange
birds, and there was an examination. A flurry of
fast questions was in the air.
One of the prisoners was nursing a superficial
wound in the foot. He cuddled it, baby-wise,
but he looked up from it often to curse with an
astonishing utter abandon straight at the noses of
his captors. He consigned them to red regions;
The Red Badge of Courage |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the
ground that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are
perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins.
There is also this to be said. It is immoral to use private
property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from
the institution of private property. It is both immoral and
unfair.
Under Socialism all this will, of course, be altered. There will
be no people living in fetid dens and fetid rags, and bringing up
unhealthy, hunger-pinched children in the midst of impossible and
absolutely repulsive surroundings. The security of society will
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Jungle by Upton Sinclair: been discontented for a long time, and not without some cause.
He paid good board, and was yet obliged to live in a family where
nobody had enough to eat. And Marija would keep giving them all
her money, and of course he could not but feel that he was called
upon to do the same. Then there were crying brats, and all sorts
of misery; a man would have had to be a good deal of a hero to stand
it all without grumbling, and Jonas was not in the least a hero--he was
simply a weatherbeaten old fellow who liked to have a good supper and
sit in the corner by the fire and smoke his pipe in peace before he
went to bed. Here there was not room by the fire, and through the
winter the kitchen had seldom been warm enough for comfort. So, with
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