| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson by Robert Louis Stevenson: I shall be steering head first for another rapid before many days;
NITOR AQUIS, said a certain Eton boy, translating for his sins a
part of the INLAND VOYAGE into Latin elegiacs; and from the hour I
saw it, or rather a friend of mine, the admirable Jenkin, saw and
recognised its absurd appropriateness, I took it for my device in
life. I am going for thirty now; and unless I can snatch a little
rest before long, I have, I may tell you in confidence, no hope of
seeing thirty-one. My health began to break last winter, and has
given me but fitful times since then. This pleurisy, though but a
slight affair in itself was a huge disappointment to me, and marked
an epoch. To start a pleurisy about nothing, while leading a dull,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Alcibiades I by Plato: habitation of the still more ancient Aeacus, before Artaxerxes, son of
Xerxes. You should consider how inferior we are to them both in the
derivation of our birth and in other particulars. Did you never observe
how great is the property of the Spartan kings? And their wives are under
the guardianship of the Ephori, who are public officers and watch over
them, in order to preserve as far as possible the purity of the Heracleid
blood. Still greater is the difference among the Persians; for no one
entertains a suspicion that the father of a prince of Persia can be any one
but the king. Such is the awe which invests the person of the queen, that
any other guard is needless. And when the heir of the kingdom is born, all
the subjects of the king feast; and the day of his birth is for ever
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson: blindman's buff; but the catechist grew angrier and angrier, and
at last began to swear in Gaelic and to strike for my legs with
his staff.
Then I told him that, sure enough, I had a pistol in my pocket as
well as he, and if he did not strike across the hill due south I
would even blow his brains out.
He became at once very polite, and after trying to soften me for
some time, but quite in vain, he cursed me once more in Gaelic
and took himself off. I watched him striding along, through bog
and brier, tapping with his stick, until he turned the end of a
hill and disappeared in the next hollow. Then I struck on again
Kidnapped |
