| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Walking by Henry David Thoreau: large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and
more tame and cheap. A people who would begin by burning the
fences and let the forest stand! I saw the fences half consumed,
their ends lost in the middle of the prairie, and some worldly
miser with a surveyor looking after his bounds, while heaven had
taken place around him, and he did not see the angels going to
and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole in the midst of
paradise. I looked again, and saw him standing in the middle of a
boggy Stygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he had found his
bounds without a doubt, three little stones, where a stake had
been driven, and looking nearer, I saw that the Prince of
Walking |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: take only a single case, that of working or sterile ants. How the workers
have been rendered sterile is a difficulty; but not much greater than that
of any other striking modification of structure; for it can be shown that
some insects and other articulate animals in a state of nature occasionally
become sterile; and if such insects had been social, and it had been
profitable to the community that a number should have been annually born
capable of work, but incapable of procreation, I can see no very great
difficulty in this being effected by natural selection. But I must pass
over this preliminary difficulty. The great difficulty lies in the working
ants differing widely from both the males and the fertile females in
structure, as in the shape of the thorax and in being destitute of wings
On the Origin of Species |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: can contrive to lift them into a loftier and purer region. So
it proved with the poor Giant, whom I am really a little sorry
for, notwithstanding his uncivil way of treating strangers who
came to visit him.
When his strength and breath were quite gone, Hercules gave his
huge body a toss, and flung it about a mile off, where it fell
heavily, and lay with no more motion than a sand hill. It was
too late for the Giant's Mother Earth to help him now; and I
should not wonder if his ponderous bones were lying on the same
spot to this very day, and were mistaken for those of an
uncommonly large elephant.
Tanglewood Tales |
