| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: inevitable end that menaced the larger vessel.
A moment later the collision came. Men were hurled in every
direction from the ship's deck, while she, bent and crumpled,
took the last, long plunge to the scrap-heap at the shaft's base.
With her fell a shower of her own tiny fliers, for each of
them had come in violent collision with the solid shaft.
I noticed that the wrecked fliers scraped down the shaft's side,
and that their fall was not as rapid as might have been expected;
The Warlord of Mars |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Protagoras by Plato: speaking the truth or not?
They all thought that what I said was entirely true.
Then you agree, I said, that the pleasant is the good, and the painful
evil. And here I would beg my friend Prodicus not to introduce his
distinction of names, whether he is disposed to say pleasurable,
delightful, joyful. However, by whatever name he prefers to call them, I
will ask you, most excellent Prodicus, to answer in my sense of the words.
Prodicus laughed and assented, as did the others.
Then, my friends, what do you say to this? Are not all actions honourable
and useful, of which the tendency is to make life painless and pleasant?
The honourable work is also useful and good?
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: long and earnestly does the great mother open the doors of her
sanctuary. He must be of a reverent turn of mind also; not rashly
discrediting any reports, however vague and fragmentary; giving man
credit always for some germ of truth, and giving Nature credit for
an inexhaustible fertility and variety, which will keep him his
life long always reverent, yet never superstitious; wondering at
the commonest, but not surprised by the most strange; free from the
idols of size and sensuous loveliness; able to see grandeur in the
minutest objects, beauty, in the most ungainly; estimating each
thing not carnally, as the vulgar do, by its size or its
pleasantness to the senses, but spiritually, by the amount of
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