| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn: impossible. It remained for irreligious Nature to furnish us with proof
positive that there can exist a society in which the pleasure of active
beneficence makes needless the idea of duty,-- a society in which
instinctive morality can dispense with ethical codes of every sort,-- a
society of which every member is born so absolutely unselfish, and so
energetically good, that moral training could signify, even for its
youngest, neither more nor less than waste of precious time.
To the Evolutionist such facts necessarily suggest that the value of our
moral idealism is but temporary; and that something better than virtue,
better than kindness, better than self-denial,-- in the present human
meaning of those terms,-- might, under certain conditions, eventually
Kwaidan |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Master and Man by Leo Tolstoy: millionaires. And why? Take pains and God gives. If only He
grants me health!'
The thought that he might himself be a millionaire like
Mironov, who began with nothing, so excited Vasili Andreevich
that he felt the need of talking to somebody. But there was no
one to talk to. . . . If only he could have reached Goryachkin
he would have talked to the landlord and shown him a thing or
two.
'Just see how it blows! It will snow us up so deep that we
shan't be able to get out in the morning!' he thought,
listening to a gust of wind that blew against the front of the
Master and Man |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Margret Howth: A Story of To-day by Rebecca Harding Davis: frightened away, and darkened into the muddy niches. There was a
vague dread in the sudden silence. She called to the old donkey,
and went faster down the hill, as if escaping from some
overhanging peril, unseen. She saw Margret coming up the road.
There was a phaeton behind Lois, and some horsemen: she jolted
the cart off into the stones to let them pass, seeing Mr.
Holmes's face in the carriage as she did so. He did not look at
her; had his head turned towards the gray distance. Lois's vivid
eye caught the full meaning of the woman beside him. The face
hurt her: not fair, as Polston called it: vapid and cruel. She
was dressed in yellow: the colour seemed jeering and mocking to
Margret Howth: A Story of To-day |
