| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Ballads by Robert Louis Stevenson: LOVE, LOVE IN THE VALLEY, LOVE ALL ALONE.
"Taheia, heavy of hair, a foolish thing have we done,
To bind what gods have sundered unkindly into one.
Why should a lowly lover have touched Taheia's skirt,
Taheia the well-descended, and Rua child of the dirt?"
" - On high with the haka-ikis my father sits in state,
Ten times fifty kinsmen salute him in the gate;
Round all his martial body, and in bands across his face,
The marks of the tattooer proclaim his lofty place.
I too, in the hands of the cunning, in the sacred cabin of palm, (5)
Have shrunk like the mimosa, and bleated like the lamb;
Ballads |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: universal notions, which combine into particulars and individuals, and are
taken out of the first rude agglomeration of sounds that they may be
replaced in a higher and more logical order. We see that in the simplest
sentences are contained grammar and logic--the parts of speech, the Eleatic
philosophy and the Kantian categories. So complex is language, and so
expressive not only of the meanest wants of man, but of his highest
thoughts; so various are the aspects in which it is regarded by us. Then
again, when we follow the history of languages, we observe that they are
always slowly moving, half dead, half alive, half solid, half fluid; the
breath of a moment, yet like the air, continuous in all ages and
countries,--like the glacier, too, containing within them a trickling
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Illustrious Gaudissart by Honore de Balzac: Don't forget his overcoat, olive green, nor his cloak with its morocco
collar, nor the striped blue cotton shirt. In this queer figure--so
original that we cannot rub it out--how many divers personalities we
come across! In the first place, what an acrobat, what a circus, what
a battery, all in one, is the man himself, his vocation, and his
tongue! Intrepid mariner, he plunges in, armed with a few phrases, to
catch five or six thousand francs in the frozen seas, in the domain of
the red Indians who inhabit the interior of France. The provincial
fish will not rise to harpoons and torches; it can only be taken with
seines and nets and gentlest persuasions. The traveller's business is
to extract the gold in country caches by a purely intellectual
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