| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Marvelous Land of Oz by L. Frank Baum: Line-Art Drawing
away between the feet of the Army of Revolt. Another mouse quickly followed;
then another and another, in rapid succession. And suddenly such a
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scream of terror went up from the Army that it might easily have filled the
stoutest heart with consternation. The flight that ensued turned to a
stampede, and the stampede to a panic.
For while the startled mice rushed wildly about the room the Scarecrow had
only time to note a whirl of skirts and a twinkling of feet as the girls
disappeared from the palace -- pushing and crowding one another in their mad
efforts to escape.
The Marvelous Land of Oz |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson: office, or produce an article, which, in your heart of
hearts, you think a delusion and a fraud upon mankind, and
still draw your salary and go through the sham manoeuvres of
this office, or still book your profits and keep on flooding
the world with these injurious goods? - though you were old,
and bald, and the first at church, and a baronet, what are
you but a thief? These may seem hard words and mere
curiosities of the intellect, in an age when the spirit of
honesty is so sparingly cultivated that all business is
conducted upon lies and so-called customs of the trade, that
not a man bestows two thoughts on the utility or
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: his great bewilderment, that he does not want to commit it. "It
cannot be," he says, "but I am pigeon-livered, and lack gall to make
oppression bitter; else, ere this, I should have fatted all the region
kites with this slave's offal." Really one is tempted to suspect that
when Shylock asks "Hates any man the thing he would not kill?" he is
expressing the natural and proper sentiments of the human race as
Shakespear understood them, and not the vindictiveness of a stage Jew.
Gaiety of Genius
In view of these facts, it is dangerous to cite Shakespear's pessimism
as evidence of the despair of a heart broken by the Dark Lady. There
is an irrepressible gaiety of genius which enables it to bear the
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