| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Herodias by Gustave Flaubert: The Jordan wound its way through the arid plains that met his gaze;
white and glittering under the clear sky, it dazzled the eye like snow
in the rays of the sun.
The Dead Sea now looked like a sheet of lapis-lazuli; and at its
southern extremity, on the coast of Yemen, Antipas recognised clearly
what at first he had been able only dimly to perceive. Several tents
could now be plainly seen; men carrying spears were moving about among
a group of horses; and dying camp-fires shone faintly in the beams of
the rising sun.
This was a troop belonging to the sheikh of the Arabs, the daughter of
whom the tetrarch had repudiated in order to wed Herodias, already
Herodias |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from When the Sleeper Wakes by H. G. Wells: from your days--you know of course, that we still
have masses--regard you as our actual ruler. Just
as a great number of people in your days regarded the
Crown as the ruler. They are discontented--the
masses all over the earth--with the rule of your
Trustees. For the most part it is the old discontent,
the old quarrel of the common man with his
commonness--the misery of work and discipline and unfitness.
But your Trustees have ruled ill. In certain
matters, in the administration of the Labour Companies,
for example, they have been unwise. They
When the Sleeper Wakes |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: to his previous condition again; much as more materially, after a
lifetime spent in California, at his death his body is punctiliously
embalmed and sent home across five thousand miles of sea for burial.
With the Japanese the condition of affairs is somewhat different.
Their tendency to stand still is of a purely passive kind. It is a
state of neutral equilibrium, stationary of itself but perfectly
responsive to an impulse from without. Left to their own devices,
they are conservative enough, but they instantly copy a more
advanced civilization the moment they get a chance. This proclivity
on their part is not out of keeping with our theory. On the
contrary, it is precisely what was to have been expected; for we see
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