| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: involved in what they call sport, they are doing aimlessly what other
people have to be paid to do: driving horses and motor cars; trying
on dresses and walking up and down to shew them off; and acting as
footmen and housemaids to royal personages. The sole and obvious
cause of the notion that idleness is delightful and that heaven is a
place where there is nothing to be done, is our school system and our
industrial system. The school is a prison in which work is a
punishment and a curse. In avowed prisons, hard labor, the only
alleviation of a prisoner's lot, is treated as an aggravation of his
punishment; and everything possible is done to intensify the
prisoner's inculcated and unnatural notion that work is an evil. In
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: a few minutes' reflection, Louis said to me:
"If the landscape did not come to me--which it is absurd to imagine--I
must have come here. If I was here while I was asleep in my cubicle,
does not that constitute a complete severance of my body and my inner
being? Does it not prove some inscrutable locomotive faculty in the
spirit with effects resembling those of locomotion in the body? Well,
then, if my spirit and my body can be severed during sleep, why should
I not insist on their separating in the same way while I am awake? I
see no half-way mean between the two propositions.
"But if we go further into details: either the facts are due to the
action of a faculty which brings out a second being to whom my body is
Louis Lambert |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Polly of the Circus by Margaret Mayo: quivering in the shelter of his strong embrace. You are never
going to leave me--never!"
A new purpose had come into his life, the realisation of a new
necessity, and he knew that the fight which he must henceforth
make for this child was the same that he must make for himself.
Chapter XI
"I'se goin' into de Sunday-school-room to take off dat ere
widow's finishin' touches," said Mandy, as she came down the
steps.
"All right!" called Douglas. "Take these with you, perhaps they
may help." He gathered up the garlands which Polly had left on
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