| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic: with a purple band over his shoulders, and on his pale
face there shone a tranquil and tender light.
One of the workmen fetched from the stove a brand,
lighted the two candles, and bore the table with its
contents into the bedroom. The young woman plucked
Theron's sleeve, and he dumbly followed her into the
chamber of death, making one of the group of a dozen,
headed by Mrs. MacEvoy and her children, which filled the
little room, and overflowed now outward to the street door.
He found himself bowing with the others to receive the
sprinkled holy water from the priest's white fingers;
The Damnation of Theron Ware |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: renounce the absurd notion that a thing is exploded away as soon
as it is classed with others, or its origin is shown; the moment
we agree to stand by experimental results and inner quality, in
judging of values--who does not see that we are likely to
ascertain the distinctive significance of religious melancholy
and happiness, or of religious trances, far better by comparing
them as conscientiously as we can with other varieties of
melancholy, happiness, and trance, than by refusing to consider
their place in any more general series, and treating them as if
they were outside of nature's order altogether?
I hope that the course of these lectures will confirm us in this
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: Orleanists and Legitimists found themselves in the republic beside each
other with equal claims. Each side wishing, in opposition to the other,
to carry out the restoration of its own royal House, meant nothing else
than that each of the two great Interests into which the bourgeoisie is
divided--Land and Capital--sought to restore its own supremacy and the
subordinacy of the other. We speak of two bourgeois interests because
large landed property, despite its feudal coquetry and pride of race,
has become completely bourgeois through the development of modern
society. Thus did the Tories of England long fancy that they were
enthusiastic for the Kingdom, the Church and the beauties of the old
English Constitution, until the day of danger wrung from them the
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