| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: there is an exact proportion in all other animals, as well as
plants and trees: for instance, the tallest horses and oxen are
between four and five inches in height, the sheep an inch and
half, more or less: their geese about the bigness of a sparrow,
and so the several gradations downwards till you come to the
smallest, which to my sight, were almost invisible; but nature
has adapted the eyes of the Lilliputians to all objects proper
for their view: they see with great exactness, but at no great
distance. And, to show the sharpness of their sight towards
objects that are near, I have been much pleased with observing a
cook pulling a lark, which was not so large as a common fly; and
Gulliver's Travels |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson by Robert Louis Stevenson: 3. My Grandfather's Trip to Holland.
4. And (but this is, I fear, impossible) the Bell Rock Book.
When I think of how last year began, after four months of sickness
and idleness, all my plans gone to water, myself starting alone, a
kind of spectre, for Nice - should I not be grateful? Come, let us
sing unto the Lord!
Nor should I forget the expected visit, but I will not believe in
that till it befall; I am no cultivator of disappointments, 'tis a
herb that does not grow in my garden; but I get some good crops
both of remorse and gratitude. The last I can recommend to all
gardeners; it grows best in shiny weather, but once well grown, is
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from What is Man? by Mark Twain: to put up with approximations, more or less frequently; he
has better luck. To me, the others are miners working with the
gold-pan--of necessity some of the gold washes over and escapes;
whereas, in my fancy, he is quicksilver raiding down a riffle--no
grain of the metal stands much chance of eluding him. A powerful
agent is the right word: it lights the reader's way and makes it
plain; a close approximation to it will answer, and much
traveling is done in a well-enough fashion by its help, but we do
not welcome it and applaud it and rejoice in it as we do when THE
right one blazes out on us. Whenever we come upon one of those
intensely right words in a book or a newspaper the resulting
What is Man? |
