| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche: those sweet and sad poisons they borrowed from the body and the earth!
From their misery they sought escape, and the stars were too remote for
them. Then they sighed: "O that there were heavenly paths by which to
steal into another existence and into happiness!" Then they contrived for
themselves their by-paths and bloody draughts!
Beyond the sphere of their body and this earth they now fancied themselves
transported, these ungrateful ones. But to what did they owe the
convulsion and rapture of their transport? To their body and this earth.
Gentle is Zarathustra to the sickly. Verily, he is not indignant at their
modes of consolation and ingratitude. May they become convalescents and
overcomers, and create higher bodies for themselves!
Thus Spake Zarathustra |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Montezuma's Daughter by H. Rider Haggard: they had fired to give them more light, and the sound of chanting,
the turmoil and confusion grew so great as to render the carrying
out of my purpose easier than I had hoped. By this time my friend,
the captain of the Otomie, was at my side, and with him several men
whom he could trust. Stooping down, with a few swift blows of a
knife I cut the ropes which bound the Spaniards. Then we gathered
ourselves into a knot, twelve of us or more, and in the centre of
the knot we set the five Spaniards. This done, I drew my sword and
cried:
'The Teules storm the temple!' which was true, for already their
long line was rushing up the winding path. 'The Teules storm the
Montezuma's Daughter |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: every idea. Hence his reading; and from his reading, the reflections
that gave him the power of reducing things to their simplest
expression, and of absorbing them to study them in their essence.
Thus, the advantages of this splendid stage, acquired by other men
only after long study, were achieved by Lambert during his bodily
childhood: a happy childhood, colored by the studious joys of a born
poet.
The point which most thinkers reach at last was to him the starting-
point, whence his brain was to set out one day in search of new worlds
of knowledge. Though as yet he knew it not, he had made for himself
the most exacting life possible, and the most insatiably greedy.
Louis Lambert |
