| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane: rampant upon the front platforms of all the street cars. At first
his tongue strove with these beings, but he eventually was superior.
He became immured like an African cow. In him grew a majestic contempt
for those strings of street cars that followed him like intent bugs.
He fell into the habit, when starting on a long journey, of
fixing his eye on a high and distant object, commanding his horses
to begin, and then going into a sort of a trance of observation.
Multitudes of drivers might howl in his rear, and passengers might
load him with opprobrium, he would not awaken until some blue
policeman turned red and began to frenziedly tear bridles and beat
the soft noses of the responsible horses.
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: future, we can predict that the groups of organic beings which are now
large and triumphant, and which are least broken up, that is, which as yet
have suffered least extinction, will for a long period continue to
increase. But which groups will ultimately prevail, no man can predict;
for we well know that many groups, formerly most extensively developed,
have now become extinct. Looking still more remotely to the future, we may
predict that, owing to the continued and steady increase of the larger
groups, a multitude of smaller groups will become utterly extinct, and
leave no modified descendants; and consequently that of the species living
at any one period, extremely few will transmit descendants to a remote
futurity. I shall have to return to this subject in the chapter on
On the Origin of Species |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Firm of Nucingen by Honore de Balzac: the peace of 1815, Nucingen grasped an idea which some of us only
fully understood later, to wit, that capital is a power only when you
are very much richer than other people. In his own mind, he was
jealous of the Rothschilds. He had five millions of francs, he wanted
ten. He knew a way to make thirty millions with ten, while with five
he could only make fifteen. So he made up his mind to operate a third
suspension of payment. About that time, the great man hit on the idea
of indemnifying his creditors with paper of purely fictitious value
and keeping their coin. On the market, a great idea of this sort is
not expressed in precisely this cut-and-dried way. Such an arrangement
consists in giving a lot of grown-up children a small pie in exchange
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