| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Land of Footprints by Stewart Edward White: Conservative and Radical fought out the questions of the day, and
the Muckrakers swung by their tails and chattered about it.
Those days are all long since over. The questions of the world
are settled forever. The people have passed through the struggles
of their formative period to the ultimate highest perfection of
adjustment to material and spiritual environment of which they
were capable under the influence of their original racial force.
Parenthetically, it is now a question whether or not an added
impulse can be communicated from without. Such an impulse must
(a) unsettle all the old beliefs, (b) inspire an era of
skepticism, (c) reintroduce the old struggle of ideas between the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: fine arts. Though, when I had been exposed to the rudest blasts a
long time, my whole body began to grow torpid, when I reached the
genial atmosphere of my house I soon recovered my faculties and
prolonged my life. But the most luxuriously housed has little to
boast of in this respect, nor need we trouble ourselves to speculate
how the human race may be at last destroyed. It would be easy to
cut their threads any time with a little sharper blast from the
north. We go on dating from Cold Fridays and Great Snows; but a
little colder Friday, or greater snow would put a period to man's
existence on the globe.
The next winter I used a small cooking-stove for economy, since
Walden |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln: It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate. . .we cannot consecrate. . .
we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead,
who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power
to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember,
what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished
work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining
before us. . .that from these honored dead we take increased devotion
to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. . .
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