| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Odyssey by Homer: apart too the younglings of the flock. Now all the vessels
swam with whey, the milk-pails and the bowls, the
well-wrought vessels whereinto he milked. My company then
spake and besought me first of all to take of the cheeses
and to return, and afterwards to make haste and drive off
the kids and lambs to the swift ships from out the pens,
and to sail over the salt sea water. Howbeit I hearkened
not (and far better would it have been), but waited to see
the giant himself, and whether he would give me gifts as a
stranger's due. Yet was not his coming to be with joy to my
company.
The Odyssey |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Crowd by Gustave le Bon: not afraid to decimate their own ranks, though perfectly aware
that the scaffold to which they were sending their colleagues
to-day might be their own fate to-morrow. The truth is they had
attained to that completely automatic state which I have
described elsewhere, and no consideration would hinder them from
yielding to the suggestions by which they were hypnotised. The
following passage from the memoirs of one of them,
Billaud-Varennes, is absolutely typical on this score: "The
decisions with which we have been so reproached," he says, "WERE
NOT DESIRED BY US TWO DAYS, A SINGLE DAY BEFORE THEY WERE TAKEN:
IT WAS THE CRISIS AND NOTHING ELSE THAT GAVE RISE TO THEM."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Selected Writings of Guy De Maupassant by Guy De Maupassant: similar experience.
I.
"At that time I was twenty-five years old, and was making daubs
along the coast of Normandy. I call 'making daubs' that wandering
about, with a bag on one's back, from mountain to mountain, under
the pretext of studying and of sketching nature. I know nothing
more enjoyable than that happy-go-lucky wandering life, in which
you are perfectly free; without shackles of any kind, without
care, without preoccupation, without thought even of to-morrow.
You go in any direction you please, without any guide save your
fancy, without any counselor save your eyes. You pull up, because
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