| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from American Notes by Rudyard Kipling: to begin with. The aggressive luxury on all sides helps out the
intoxication, and you spin forever "down the ringing grooves of
change" (there is no small change, by the way, west of the
Rockies) as long as money lasts. They make greatly and they spend
lavishly; not only the rich, but the artisans, who pay nearly
five pounds for a suit of clothes, and for other luxuries in
proportion.
The young men rejoice in the days of their youth. They gamble,
yacht, race, enjoy prize-fights and cock-fights, the one openly,
the other in secret; they establish luxurious clubs; they break
themselves over horse-flesh and other things, and they are
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Polity of Athenians and Lacedaemonians by Xenophon: lawgiver set himself deliberately to provide all the blessings of
heaven for the good man, and a sorry and ill-starred existence for the
coward.
In other states the man who shows himself base and cowardly wins to
himself an evil reputation and the nickname of a coward, but that is
all. For the rest he buys and sells in the same market-place as the
good man; he sits beside him at play; he exercises with him in the
same gymnasium, and all as suits his humour. But at Lacedaemon there
is not one man who would not feel ashamed to welcome the coward at the
common mess-tabe, or to try conclusions with such an antagonist in a
wrestling bout. Consider the day's round of his existence. The sides
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Fables by Robert Louis Stevenson: "I sit here," says the man, "to get me a wife."
"There is no sense in any of these answers," thought the Earl's
daughter; "and I could find it in my heart to weep."
By came the Earl upon that; and she called him and told him all.
And when he had heard, he was of his daughter's mind that this
should be a thing of virtue; and charged the man to set a price
upon the thing, or else be hanged upon the gallows; and that was
near at hand, so that the man could see it.
"The way of life is straight like the grooves of launching," quoth
the man. "And if I am to be hanged let me be hanged."
"Why!" cried the Earl, "will you set your neck against a shoe of a
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