| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Dreams & Dust by Don Marquis: This is another day; and its young strength
Is laid upon the quivering hills until,
Like Egypt's Memnon, they grow quick with song.
This is another day, and the bold world
Leaps up and grasps its light, and laughs, as leapt
Prometheus up and wrenched the fire from Zeus.
This is another day--are its eyes blurred
With maudlin grief for any wasted past?
A thousand thousand failures shall not daunt!
Let dust clasp dust; death, death--I am alive!
And out of all the dust and death of mine
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Of The Nature of Things by Lucretius: BOOK V
PROEM
O WHO can build with puissant breast a song
Worthy the majesty of these great finds?
Or who in words so strong that he can frame
The fit laudations for deserts of him
Who left us heritors of such vast prizes,
By his own breast discovered and sought out?-
There shall be none, methinks, of mortal stock.
For if must needs be named for him the name
Of The Nature of Things |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift: American acquaintance assured me from frequent experience, that
their flesh was generally tough and lean, like that of our
school-boys, by continual exercise, and their taste disagreeable,
and to fatten them would not answer the charge. Then as to the
females, it would, I think, with humble submission, be a loss to
the publick, because they soon would become breeders themselves:
And besides, it is not improbable that some scrupulous people
might be apt to censure such a practice, (although indeed very
unjustly) as a little bordering upon cruelty, which, I confess,
hath always been with me the strongest objection against any
project, how well soever intended.
A Modest Proposal |
