| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Confessio Amantis by John Gower: For er thei wente thanne atwo,
A knave child betwen hem two
Thei gete, which was after hote
Paphus, of whom yit hath the note
A certein yle, which Paphos
Men clepe, and of his name it ros.
Be this ensample thou miht finde
That word mai worche above kinde.
Forthi, my Sone, if that thou spare
To speke, lost is al thi fare, 440
For Slowthe bringth in alle wo.
Confessio Amantis |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Human Drift by Jack London: achieved, but, soon or late, man will find himself face to face
with Malthus' grim law. Not only will population catch up with
subsistence, but it will press against subsistence, and the
pressure will be pitiless and savage. Somewhere in the future is
a date when man will face, consciously, the bitter fact that there
is not food enough for all of him to eat.
When this day comes, what then? Will there be a recrudescence of
old obsolete war? In a saturated population life is always cheap,
as it is cheap in China, in India, to-day. Will new human drifts
take place, questing for room, carving earth-space out of crowded
life. Will the Sword again sing:
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells: had the dull incoherent wickedness of the sort of men who exploit
drunkenness and the turf. It offends within limits. Barristers can
be, and are, disbarred. But it is now a profession extraordinarily
out of date; its code of honour derives from a time of cruder and
lower conceptions of human relationship. It apprehends the State as
a mere "ring" kept about private disputations; it has not begun to
move towards the modern conception of the collective enterprise as
the determining criterion of human conduct. It sees its business as
a mere play upon the rules of a game between man and man, or between
men and men. They haggle, they dispute, they inflict and suffer
wrongs, they evade dues, and are liable or entitled to penalties and
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