| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Father Damien by Robert Louis Stevenson: probably denounce sensational descriptions, stretching your limbs
the while in your pleasant parlour on Beretania Street. When I was
pulled ashore there one early morning, there sat with me in the
boat two sisters, bidding farewell (in humble imitation of Damien)
to the lights and joys of human life. One of these wept silently;
I could not withhold myself from joining her. Had you been there,
it is my belief that nature would have triumphed even in you; and
as the boat drew but a little nearer, and you beheld the stairs
crowded with abominable deformations of our common manhood, and saw
yourself landing in the midst of such a population as only now and
then surrounds us in the horror of a nightmare - what a haggard eye
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau: State. But, if I deny the authority of the State when it
presents its tax bill, it will soon take and waste all my
property, and so harass me and my children without end.
This is hard. This makes it impossible for a man to live
honestly, and at the same time comfortably, in outward
respects. It will not be worth the while to accumulate
property; that would be sure to go again. You must hire or
squat somewhere, and raise but a small crop, and eat that
soon. You must live within yourself, and depend upon
yourself always tucked up and ready for a start, and not
have many affairs. A man may grow rich in Turkey even, if
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Call of the Wild by Jack London: the articulate travail of existence. It was an old song, old as
the breed itself--one of the first songs of the younger world in a
day when songs were sad. It was invested with the woe of
unnumbered generations, this plaint by which Buck was so strangely
stirred. When he moaned and sobbed, it was with the pain of
living that was of old the pain of his wild fathers, and the fear
and mystery of the cold and dark that was to them fear and
mystery. And that he should be stirred by it marked the
completeness with which he harked back through the ages of fire
and roof to the raw beginnings of life in the howling ages.
Seven days from the time they pulled into Dawson, they dropped
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