| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: the most plausible appearance of design can be accounted for by
Natural Selection; and it would be so absurd to keep a child in
delusive ignorance of so potent a factor in evolution as to keep it in
ignorance of radiation or capillary attraction. Even if you make a
religion of Natural Selection, and teach the child to regard itself as
the irresponsible prey of its circumstances and appetites (or its
heredity as you will perhaps call them), you will none the less find
that its appetites are stimulated by your encouragement and daunted by
your discouragement; that one of its appetites is an appetite for
perfection; that if you discourage this appetite and encourage the
cruder acquisitive appetites the child will steal and lie and be a
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne: "It was Gray's idea of heaven, to lounge on a sofa and read new
novels. Now, what more appropriate torture would Dante himself
have contrived, for the sinner who perpetrates a bad book, than
to be continually turning over the manuscript?"
"It would fail of effect," said I, "because a bad author is
always his own great admirer."
"I lack that one characteristic of my tribe,--the only desirable
one," observed Oberon. "But how many recollections throng upon
me, as I turn over these leaves! This scene came into my fancy as
I walked along a hilly road, on a starlight October evening; in
the pure and bracing air, I became all soul, and felt as if I
The Snow Image |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne by Robert Louis Stevenson: impression of high summer to my Scottish body; although the
chestnuts were already picked out by the autumn, and the poplars,
that here began to mingle with them, had turned into pale gold
against the approach of winter.
There was something in this landscape, smiling although wild, that
explained to me the spirit of the Southern Covenanters. Those who
took to the hills for conscience' sake in Scotland had all gloomy
and bedevilled thoughts; for once that they received God's comfort
they would be twice engaged with Satan; but the Camisards had only
bright and supporting visions. They dealt much more in blood, both
given and taken; yet I find no obsession of the Evil One in their
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