| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare: Shall cool the heat of this descending sun:
I'll make a shadow for thee of my hairs; 191
If they burn too, I'll quench them with my tears.
'The sun that shines from heaven shines but warm,
And lo! I lie between that sun and thee:
The heat I have from thence doth little harm,
Thine eye darts forth the fire that burneth me; 196
And were I not immortal, life were done
Between this heavenly and earthly sun.
'Art thou obdurate, flinty, hard as steel?
Nay, more than flint, for stone at rain relenteth: 200
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: put it down. Can't you sail us beyond its reach, Mr. Flamel?"
Flamel shook his head. "Not even with this breeze. Literature
travels faster than steam nowadays. And the worst of it is that
we can't any of us give up reading; it's as insidious as a vice
and as tiresome as a virtue."
"I believe it IS a vice, almost, to read such a book as the
'Letters,'" said Mrs. Touchett. "It's the woman's soul,
absolutely torn up by the roots--her whole self laid bare; and to
a man who evidently didn't care; who couldn't have cared. I don't
mean to read another line; it's too much like listening at a
keyhole."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Proposed Roads To Freedom by Bertrand Russell: part of the teachings of Marx. The workers, he
says, have a Fatherland as soon as they become
citizens, and on this basis he defends that degree of
nationalism which the war has since shown to be
prevalent in the ranks of Socialists. He even goes
so far as to maintain that European nations have a
right to tropical territory owing to their higher
civilization. Such doctrines diminish revolutionary
ardor and tend to transform Socialists into a left
wing of the Liberal Party. But the increasing prosperity
of wage-earners before the war made these
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