| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne: concentric rings resembling that of Saturn. In their turn,
again, these rings of cosmical matter, excited by a rotary
motion about the central mass, would have been broken up and
decomposed into secondary nebulosities, that is to say,
into planets. Similarly he would have observed these planets
throw off one or more rings each, which became the origin of the
secondary bodies which we call satellites.
Thus, then, advancing from atom to molecule, from molecule to
nebulous mass, from that to principal star, from star to sun,
from sun to planet, and hence to satellite, we have the whole
series of transformations undergone by the heavenly bodies
From the Earth to the Moon |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Hellenica by Xenophon: meet this difficulty a resolution was passed empowering each of the
committee to seize on one of the resident aliens apiece, to put his
victim to death, and to confiscate his property. Theramenes was
invited, or rather told to seize some one or other. "Choose whom you
will, only let it be done." To which he made answer, it hardly seemed
to him a noble or worthy course on the part of those who claimed to be
the elite of society to go beyond the informers[8] in injustice.
"Yesterday they, to-day we; with this difference, the victim of the
informer must live as a source of income; our innocents must die that
we may get their wealth. Surely their method was innocent in
comparison with ours."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Unconscious Comedians by Honore de Balzac: "And he is not the first man driven man by Fourier's ideas," said
Bixiou. "You don't know anything about Paris. Ask it for a hundred
thousand francs to realize an idea that will be useful to humanity,--
the steam-engine for instance,--and you'll die, like Salomon de Caux,
at Bicetre; but if the money is wanted for some paradoxical absurdity,
Parisians will annihilate themselves and their fortune for it. It is
the same with systems as it is with material things. Utterly
impracticable newspapers have consumed millions within the last
fifteen years. What makes your lawsuit so hard to win, is that you
have right on your side, and on that of the prefect there are (so you
suppose) secret motives."
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