| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: once Alberic gets the ring back, he will easily out-Valhalla
Valhalla, if not buy it over as a going concern. The only chance
of permanent security, then, is the appearance in the world of a
hero who, without any illicit prompting from Wotan, will destroy
Alberic and wrest the ring from Fafnir. There will then, he
believes, be no further cause for anxiety, since he does not yet
conceive Heroism as a force hostile to Godhead. In his longing
for a rescuer, it does not occur to him that when the Hero comes,
his first exploit must be to sweep the gods and their ordinances
from the path of the heroic will.
Indeed, he feels that in his own Godhead is the germ of such
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from On Horsemanship by Xenophon: hands.[1] As a matter of state organisation,[2] cavalry duties usually
devolve upon those who are not stinted in means, and who have a
considerable share in the government;[3] and it seems far better for a
young man to give heed to his own health of body and to horsemanship,
or, if he already knows how to ride with skill, to practising
manouvres, than that he should set up as a trainer of horses.[4] The
older man has his town property and his friends, and the hundred-and-
one concerns of state or of war, on which to employ his time and
energies rather than on horsebreaking. It is plain then that any one
holding my views[5] on the subject will put a young horse out to be
broken. But in so doing he ought to draw up articles, just as a father
On Horsemanship |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Poems by Bronte Sisters: pillar of a cloud glided constantly before her eyes; she ever
waited at the foot of a secret Sinai, listening in her heart to
the voice of a trumpet sounding long and waxing louder. Some,
perhaps, would rejoice over these tokens of sincere though
sorrowing piety in a deceased relative: I own, to me they seem
sad, as if her whole innocent life had been passed under the
martyrdom of an unconfessed physical pain: their effect, indeed,
would be too distressing, were it not combated by the certain
knowledge that in her last moments this tyranny of a too tender
conscience was overcome; this pomp of terrors broke up, and
passing away, left her dying hour unclouded. Her belief in God
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