| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from In a German Pension by Katherine Mansfield: for a walk, and cried "Herr Gott--happy journey" with immense ill-concealed
relish when we mentioned Schlingen.
"But that is eight kilometres," shouted one old man with a white beard, who
leaned against a fence, fanning himself with a yellow handkerchief.
"Seven and a half," answered Herr Erchardt shortly.
"Eight," bellowed the sage.
"Seven and a half!"
"Eight!"
"The man is mad," said Herr Erchardt.
"Well, please let him be mad in peace," said I, putting my hands over my
ears.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: the crown, without being able to turn aside the national interest by
means of its subordinate struggles among its own conflicting elements
and with the crown, the republic is compelled to stand up sharp against
the subjugated classes, and wrestle with them. It was a sense of
weakness that caused them to recoil before the unqualified demands of
their own class rule, and to retreat to the less complete, less
developed, and, for that very reason, less dangerous forms of the same.
As often, on the contrary, as the allied royalists come into conflict
with the Pretender who stands before them--with Bonaparte--, as often as
they believe their parliamentary omnipotence to be endangered by the
Executive, in other words, as often as they must trot out the political
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: principal act of ratiocination in man, as logicians tell us, is the finding
out the agreement or disagreement of two ideas one with another, by the
intervention of a third (called the medius terminus); just as a man, as
Locke well observes, by a yard, finds two mens nine-pin-alleys to be of the
same length, which could not be brought together, to measure their
equality, by juxta-position.
Had the same great reasoner looked on, as my father illustrated his systems
of noses, and observed my uncle Toby's deportment--what great attention he
gave to every word--and as oft as he took his pipe from his mouth, with
what wonderful seriousness he contemplated the length of it--surveying it
transversely as he held it betwixt his finger and his thumb--then fore-
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