| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass: relieved by its tears. Such is the constitution of the human
mind, that, when pressed to extremes, it often avails itself of
the most opposite methods. Extremes meet in mind as in matter.
When the slaves on board of the "Pearl" were overtaken, arrested,
and carried to prison--their hopes for freedom blasted--as they
marched in chains they sang, and found (as Emily Edmunson tells
us) a melancholy relief in singing. The singing of a man cast
away on a desolate island, might be as appropriately considered
an evidence of his contentment and happiness, as the singing of a
slave. Sorrow and desolation have their songs, as well as joy
and peace. Slaves sing more to _make_ themselves happy, than to
My Bondage and My Freedom |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Puck of Pook's Hill by Rudyard Kipling: change. He laughed at Witta for his fears, and at us for
our counselling Witta to furl sail when the ship pitched at all.
"'Better be drowned out of hand," said Thorkild of
Borkum, "than go tied to a deck-load of yellow dust."
'He was a landless man, and had been slave to some
King in the East. He would have beaten out the gold into
deep bands to put round the oars, and round the prow.
'Yet, though he vexed himself for the gold, Witta
waited upon Hugh like a woman, lending him his shoulder
when the ship rolled, and tying of ropes from side to
side that Hugh might hold by them. But for Hugh, he
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Distinguished Provincial at Paris by Honore de Balzac: lacking in the eyes of the public. He is whimsical to the last degree.
His friends have seen him destroy a finished picture because, in his
eyes, it looked too smooth. "It is overdone," he would say; "it is
niggling work."
With his eccentric, yet lofty nature, with a nervous organization and
all that it entails of torment and delight, the craving for perfection
becomes morbid. Intellectually he is akin to Sterne, though he is not
a literary worker. There is an indescribable piquancy about his
epigrams and sallies of thought. He is eloquent, he knows how to love,
but the uncertainty that appears in his execution is a part of the
very nature of the man. The brotherhood loved him for the very
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