| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche: Intoxicating joy is it for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and
forget himself. Intoxicating joy and self-forgetting, did the world once
seem to me.
This world, the eternally imperfect, an eternal contradiction's image and
imperfect image--an intoxicating joy to its imperfect creator:--thus did
the world once seem to me.
Thus, once on a time, did I also cast my fancy beyond man, like all
backworldsmen. Beyond man, forsooth?
Ah, ye brethren, that God whom I created was human work and human madness,
like all the Gods!
A man was he, and only a poor fragment of a man and ego. Out of mine own
Thus Spake Zarathustra |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The American by Henry James: had consigned the promise of his joy? He had been too bewildered
to stop them, but now he felt ready to wait for them at the gate.
Madame Urbain, with a certain attractive petulance, beckoned to
him again, and this time he went over to the carriage.
She leaned out and gave him her hand, looking at him kindly,
and smiling.
"Ah, monsieur," she said, "you don't include me in your wrath?
I had nothing to do with it."
"Oh, I don't suppose YOU could have prevented it!"
Newman answered in a tone which was not that of studied gallantry.
"What you say is too true for me to resent the small account
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce: Beyond one of the sentinels nobody was in sight; the railroad
ran straight away into a forest for a hundred yards, then,
curving, was lost to view. Doubtless there was an outpost
farther along. The other bank of the stream was open ground
-- a gentle slope topped with a stockade of vertical tree
trunks, loopholed for rifles, with a single embrasure
through which protruded the muzzle of a brass cannon
commanding the bridge. Midway up the slope between the
bridge and fort were the spectators -- a single company of
infantry in line, at "parade rest," the butts of their rifles
on the ground, the barrels inclining slightly backward
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge |
