| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: But true reason assures us that while two things (i.e. the idea and the
image) are different they cannot inhere in one another, so as to be one and
two at the same time.
To sum up: Being and generation and space, these three, existed before the
heavens, and the nurse or vessel of generation, moistened by water and
inflamed by fire, and taking the forms of air and earth, assumed various
shapes. By the motion of the vessel, the elements were divided, and like
grain winnowed by fans, the close and heavy particles settled in one place,
the light and airy ones in another. At first they were without reason and
measure, and had only certain faint traces of themselves, until God
fashioned them by figure and number. In this, as in every other part of
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: and its leaves the heather-bells, and the polypes of the sea, and
the gnats above the summer stream.
I said just now, that happy was the sportsman who was also a
naturalist. And, having once mentioned these curious water-flies,
I cannot help going a little farther, and saying, that lucky is the
fisherman who is also a naturalist. A fair scientific knowledge of
the flies which he imitates, and of their habits, would often
ensure him sport, while other men are going home with empty creels.
One would have fancied this a self-evident fact; yet I have never
found any sound knowledge of the natural water-flies which haunt a
given stream, except among cunning old fishermen of the lower
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln: upon this continent a new nation: conceived in liberty, and
dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war. . .testing whether
that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated. . .
can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war.
We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place
for those who here gave their lives that this nation might live.
It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate. . .we cannot consecrate. . .
we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead,
who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power
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