| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from What is Man? by Mark Twain: glory, praise, flattery, for every valuable thing he possesses--
BORROWED finery, the whole of it; no rag of it earned by himself,
not a detail of it produced by his own labor. YOU make man a
humbug; have I done worse by him?
Y.M. You have made a machine of him.
O.M. Who devised that cunning and beautiful mechanism, a
man's hand?
Y.M. God.
O.M. Who devised the law by which it automatically hammers
out of a piano an elaborate piece of music, without error, while
the man is thinking about something else, or talking to a friend?
What is Man? |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: Anacreon, Solon, and many other poets, as famous for beauty and virtue and
all other high fortune: and your mother's house is equally distinguished;
for your maternal uncle, Pyrilampes, is reputed never to have found his
equal, in Persia at the court of the great king, or on the continent of
Asia, in all the places to which he went as ambassador, for stature and
beauty; that whole family is not a whit inferior to the other. Having such
ancestors you ought to be first in all things, and, sweet son of Glaucon,
your outward form is no dishonour to any of them. If to beauty you add
temperance, and if in other respects you are what Critias declares you to
be, then, dear Charmides, blessed art thou, in being the son of thy mother.
And here lies the point; for if, as he declares, you have this gift of
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: to the advancing columns beyond, above which floated bravely in
the arctic air the flags and banners of Helium.
An instant later every red man in the lofty chamber had seen
the inspiring sight, and such a shout of thanksgiving arose as I
warrant never before echoed through that age-old pile of stone.
But still we must fight on, for though our troops had entered Kadabra,
the city was yet far from capitulation, nor had the palace been
even assaulted. Turn and turn about we held the top of the runway
while the others feasted their eyes upon the sight of our valiant
The Warlord of Mars |
