| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Of The Nature of Things by Lucretius: And travail and perish equally with those,
And no rein curbs them from annihilation.
For which will last against the grip and crush
Under the teeth of death? the fire? the moist?
Or else the air? which then? the blood? the bones?
No one, methinks, when every thing will be
At bottom as mortal as whate'er we mark
To perish by force before our gazing eyes.
But my appeal is to the proofs above
That things cannot fall back to naught, nor yet
From naught increase. And now again, since food
Of The Nature of Things |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Road to Oz by L. Frank Baum: ends of its wooden legs, were shod with plates of solid gold, and the
saddle strapped to the wooden body was richly embroidered and
glistened with jewels.
As he reached the palace the Scarecrow looked up and saw Dorothy, and
at once waved his peaked hat at her in greeting. He rode up to the
front door and dismounted, and the band stopped playing and went away
and the crowds of people returned to their dwellings.
By the time Dorothy and her friends had re-entered her room, the
Scarecrow was there, and he gave the girl a hearty embrace and shook
the hands of the others with his own squashy hands, which were white
gloves filled with straw.
The Road to Oz |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: the true artist, and that to a degree unknown in other and
less intimate pursuits. For other professions stand apart
from the human business of life; but an art has its seat at
the centre of the artist's doings and sufferings, deals
directly with his experiences, teaches him the lessons of his
own fortunes and mishaps, and becomes a part of his
biography. So says Goethe:
"Spat erklingt was fruh erklang;
Gluck und Ungluck wird Gesang."
Now Thoreau's art was literature; and it was one of which he
had conceived most ambitiously. He loved and believed in
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