| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Atheist's Mass by Honore de Balzac: whip, and the least treacherous of them all is the man whom you
see coming to fire his pistol at you point blank.
"You yourself, my dear boy, are clever enough to make
acquaintance before long with the odious and incessant warfare
waged by mediocrity against the superior man. If you should drop
five-and-twenty louis one day, you will be accused of gambling on
the next, and your best friends will report that you have lost
twenty-five thousand. If you have a headache, you will be
considered mad. If you are a little hasty, no one can live with
you. If, to make a stand against this armament of pigmies, you
collect your best powers, your best friends will cry out that you
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Thuvia, Maid of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: and all because of the stubbornness of a single woman
who would not wed the prince who loves her.
"Refuse, Thuvia of Ptarth, and there remains but a
single alternative--no man must ever know your fate.
Only a handful of loyal servitors besides my royal father
and myself know that you were stolen from the gardens of
Thuvan Dihn by Astok, Prince of Dusar, or that to-day
you be imprisoned in my palace.
"Refuse, Thuvia of Ptarth, and you must die to save Dusar--
there is no other way. Nutus, the jeddak, has so decreed.
I have spoken."
Thuvia, Maid of Mars |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Protagoras by Plato: into the citadel of heaven, where Zeus dwelt, who moreover had terrible
sentinels; but he did enter by stealth into the common workshop of Athene
and Hephaestus, in which they used to practise their favourite arts, and
carried off Hephaestus' art of working by fire, and also the art of Athene,
and gave them to man. And in this way man was supplied with the means of
life. But Prometheus is said to have been afterwards prosecuted for theft,
owing to the blunder of Epimetheus.
Now man, having a share of the divine attributes, was at first the only one
of the animals who had any gods, because he alone was of their kindred; and
he would raise altars and images of them. He was not long in inventing
articulate speech and names; and he also constructed houses and clothes and
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