| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The King of the Golden River by John Ruskin: fringes of spearlike pine. Far above shot up red, splintered masses
of castellated rock, jagged and shivered into myriads of fantastic
forms, with here and there a streak of sunlit snow traced down their
chasms like a line of forked lightning; and far beyond and far above
all these, fainter than the morning cloud but purer and changeless,
slept, in the blue sky, the utmost peaks of the eternal snow.
The Golden River, which sprang from one of the lower and
snowless elevations, was now nearly in shadow--all but the uppermost
jets of spray, which rose like slow smoke above the undulating line
of the cataract and floated away in feeble wreaths upon the morning
wind.
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from My Aunt Margaret's Mirror by Walter Scott: highroad, from which it stands at some distance, but by means of
a greensward footpath leading through some pretty meadows. I
have so little left to torment me in life, that it is one of my
greatest vexations to know that several of these sequestered
fields have been devoted as sites for building. In that which is
nearest the town, wheelbarrows have been at work for several
weeks in such numbers, that, I verily believe, its whole surface,
to the depth of at least eighteen inches, was mounted in these
monotrochs at the same moment, and in the act of being
transported from one place to another. Huge triangular piles of
planks are also reared in different parts of the devoted
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau: contemplations too. See what gross inconsistency is tolerated.
I have heard some of my townsmen say, "I should like to
have them order me out to help put down an insurrection
of the slaves, or to march to Mexico--see if I would go";
and yet these very men have each, directly by their
allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their money,
furnished a substitute. The soldier is applauded who
refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse
to sustain the unjust government which makes the war;
is applauded by those whose own act and authority he disregards
and sets at naught; as if the state were penitent to that
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience |
