| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from What is Man? by Mark Twain: neighbor who tried to rob the town of its rights in a certain
common, and did not succeed.
He lived five or six years--till 1616--in the joy of these
elevated pursuits. Then he made a will, and signed each of its
three pages with his name.
A thoroughgoing business man's will. It named in minute
detail every item of property he owned in the world--houses,
lands, sword, silver-gilt bowl, and so on--all the way down to
his "second-best bed" and its furniture.
It carefully and calculatingly distributed his riches among
the members of his family, overlooking no individual of it. Not
What is Man? |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Euthyphro by Plato: precise answer, which you have not as yet given, my friend, to the
question, What is 'piety'? When asked, you only replied, Doing as you do,
charging your father with murder.
EUTHYPHRO: And what I said was true, Socrates.
SOCRATES: No doubt, Euthyphro; but you would admit that there are many
other pious acts?
EUTHYPHRO: There are.
SOCRATES: Remember that I did not ask you to give me two or three examples
of piety, but to explain the general idea which makes all pious things to
be pious. Do you not recollect that there was one idea which made the
impious impious, and the pious pious?
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving: sleeping uncomfortably and turning suddenly in his bed.
All the stories of ghosts and goblins that he had heard in
the afternoon now came crowding upon his recollection. The night
grew darker and darker; the stars seemed to sink deeper in the
sky, and driving clouds occasionally hid them from his sight. He
had never felt so lonely and dismal. He was, moreover,
approaching the very place where many of the scenes of the ghost
stories had been laid. In the centre of the road stood an
enormous tulip-tree, which towered like a giant above all the
other trees of the neighborhood, and formed a kind of landmark.
Its limbs were gnarled and fantastic, large enough to form trunks
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow |
