| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: self-analytic youth who, finding that, after eating, his digestion
failed to give him what he considered its proper sensations, had
come to consult the doctor as to how it ought to feel. "Feel! young
man," he was answered, "you ought not to be aware that you have a
digestion." So with them, a normally constituted son knows not what
it is to possess a spontaneity of his own. Indeed, this very word
"own," which so long ago in our own tongue took to itself the symbol
of possession, well exemplifies his dependent state. China furnishes
the most conspicuous instance of the want of individual rights.
A Chinese son cannot properly be said to own anything. The title to
the land he tills is vested absolutely in the family, of which he is
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Time Machine by H. G. Wells: come home to him. I even tried a Carlyle-like scorn of this
wretched aristocracy in decay. But this attitude of mind was
impossible. However great their intellectual degradation, the
Eloi had kept too much of the human form not to claim my
sympathy, and to make me perforce a sharer in their degradation
and their Fear.
`I had at that time very vague ideas as to the course I should
pursue. My first was to secure some safe place of refuge, and to
make myself such arms of metal or stone as I could contrive.
That necessity was immediate. In the next place, I hoped to
procure some means of fire, so that I should have the weapon of a
The Time Machine |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Illustrious Gaudissart by Honore de Balzac: the good-man has seen them he insists on bottling them off himself!"
Madame Vernier had related the poor woman's trouble to her husband
just before the entrance of Gaudissart, and at the first words of the
famous traveller Vernier determined that he should be made to grapple
with Margaritis.
"Monsieur," said the ex-dyer, as soon as the illustrious Gaudissart
had fired his first broadside, "I will not hide from you the great
difficulties which my native place offers to your enterprise. This
part of the country goes along, as it were, in the rough,--"suo modo."
It is a country where new ideas don't take hold. We live as our
fathers lived, we amuse ourselves with four meals a day, and we
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