| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: colours altogether disagreeable:" although I must beg leave to
say for myself, that I am as fair as most of my sex and country,
and very little sunburnt by all my travels. On the other side,
discoursing of the ladies in that emperor's court, he used to
tell me, "one had freckles; another too wide a mouth; a third too
large a nose;" nothing of which I was able to distinguish. I
confess this reflection was obvious enough; which, however, I
could not forbear, lest the reader might think those vast
creatures were actually deformed: for I must do them the justice
to say, they are a comely race of people, and particularly the
features of my master's countenance, although he was but a
Gulliver's Travels |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: conspicuous in life; obtaining a position which shall be
acknowledged by others to be respectable or honourable. We do not
understand by this advancement, in general, the mere making of
money, but the being known to have made it; not the accomplishment
of any great aim, but the being seen to have accomplished it. In a
word, we mean the gratification of our thirst for applause. That
thirst, if the last infirmity of noble minds, is also the first
infirmity of weak ones; and, on the whole, the strongest impulsive
influence of average humanity: the greatest efforts of the race
have always been traceable to the love of praise, as its greatest
catastrophes to the love of pleasure.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: merely what ordinary, respectable, commonplace people would be if
they had not got enough to eat. When private property is abolished
there will be no necessity for crime, no demand for it; it will
cease to exist. Of course, all crimes are not crimes against
property, though such are the crimes that the English law, valuing
what a man has more than what a man is, punishes with the harshest
and most horrible severity, if we except the crime of murder, and
regard death as worse than penal servitude, a point on which our
criminals, I believe, disagree. But though a crime may not be
against property, it may spring from the misery and rage and
depression produced by our wrong system of property-holding, and
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