| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Road to Oz by L. Frank Baum: "It was called the Powder of Life," was the answer; "and it was
invented by a crooked Sorcerer who lived in the mountains of the North
Country. A Witch named Mombi got some of this powder from the crooked
Sorcerer and took it home with her. Ozma lived with the Witch then,
for it was before she became our Princess, while Mombi had transformed
her into the shape of a boy. Well, while Mombi was gone to the
crooked Sorcerer's, the boy made this pumpkin-headed man to amuse
himself, and also with the hope of frightening the Witch with it when
she returned. But Mombi was not scared, and she sprinkled the
Pumpkinhead with her Magic Powder of Life, to see if the Powder would
work. Ozma was watching, and saw the Pumpkinhead come to life; so that
The Road to Oz |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Damnation of Theron Ware by Harold Frederic: and a surrounding cluster of women of the neighborhood,
some of the more elderly of whom, shrivelled little
crones in tidy caps, and with their aprons to their eyes,
were beginning in a low-murmured minor the wail
which presently should rise into the keen of death.
Mrs. MacEvoy herself made no moan, and her broad ruddy
face was stern in expression rather than sorrowful.
When the litter stopped beside her, she laid a hand
for an instant on her husband's wet brow, and looked--
one could have sworn impassively--into his staring eyes.
Then, still without a word, she waved the bearers toward
The Damnation of Theron Ware |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: their own subtlety grew on them, the worship not of objective truth, but
of the forms of the intellect whereby it may be demonstrated; till they
became the veriest word-splitters, rivals of the old sophists whom their
master had attacked, and justified too often Aristophanes' calumny,
which confounded Socrates with his opponents, as a man whose aim was to
make the worse appear the better reason.
We have here, in both parties, all the marks of an age of exhaustion, of
scepticism, of despair about finding any real truth. No wonder that
they were superseded by the Pyrrhonists, who doubted all things, and by
the Academy, which prided itself on setting up each thing to knock it
down again; and so by prudent and well-bred and tolerant qualifying of
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