| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: charge of the fourteen young men and damsels. Surrounded by
these armed warriors, Prince Theseus and his companions were
led to the king's palace, and ushered into his presence. Now,
Minos was a stern and pitiless king. If the figure that guarded
Crete was made of brass, then the monarch, who ruled over it,
might be thought to have a still harder metal in his breast,
and might have been called a man of iron. He bent his shaggy
brows upon the poor Athenian victims. Any other mortal,
beholding their fresh and tender beauty, and their innocent
looks, would have felt himself sitting on thorns until he had
made every soul of them happy by bidding them go free as the
Tanglewood Tales |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Phaedrus by Plato: the persons who will be most relieved, and will therefore be the most
grateful; and when you make a feast you should invite not your friend, but
the beggar and the empty soul; for they will love you, and attend you, and
come about your doors, and will be the best pleased, and the most grateful,
and will invoke many a blessing on your head. Yet surely you ought not to
be granting favours to those who besiege you with prayer, but to those who
are best able to reward you; nor to the lover only, but to those who are
worthy of love; nor to those who will enjoy the bloom of your youth, but to
those who will share their possessions with you in age; nor to those who,
having succeeded, will glory in their success to others, but to those who
will be modest and tell no tales; nor to those who care about you for a
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: forty-eight million miles of space back to Earth once more.
I had wondered if he had found his black-haired Princess and the
slender son he had dreamed was with her in the royal gardens of
Tardos Mors, awaiting his return.
Or, had he found that he had been too late, and thus gone back to a
living death upon a dead world? Or was he really dead after all,
never to return either to his mother Earth or his beloved Mars?
Thus was I lost in useless speculation one sultry August
evening when old Ben, my body servant, handed me a telegram.
Tearing it open I read:
'Meet me to-morrow hotel Raleigh Richmond.
The Gods of Mars |
