| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: are frogs there -- who would fain keep up the hilarious rules of
their old festal tables, though their voices have waxed hoarse and
solemnly grave, mocking at mirth, and the wine has lost its flavor,
and become only liquor to distend their paunches, and sweet
intoxication never comes to drown the memory of the past, but mere
saturation and waterloggedness and distention. The most aldermanic,
with his chin upon a heart-leaf, which serves for a napkin to his
drooling chaps, under this northern shore quaffs a deep draught of
the once scorned water, and passes round the cup with the
ejaculation tr-r-r-oonk, tr-r-r--oonk, tr-r-r-oonk! and straightway
comes over the water from some distant cove the same password
Walden |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave by Frederick Douglass: warmly urged, against my learning to read, only
served to inspire me with a desire and determina-
tion to learn. In learning to read, I owe almost as
much to the bitter opposition of my master, as to
the kindly aid of my mistress. I acknowledge the
benefit of both.
I had resided but a short time in Baltimore before
I observed a marked difference, in the treatment of
slaves, from that which I had witnessed in the coun-
try. A city slave is almost a freeman, compared with
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Enemies of Books by William Blades: many a decade-damp dust, half an inch thick, having settled upon them!
Then came the fire, and while the roof was all ablaze streams
of hot water, like a boiling deluge, washed down upon them.
The wonder was they were not turned into a muddy pulp.
After all was over, the whole of the library, no portion of which
could legally be given away, was _lent for ever_ to the Corporation
of London. Scorched and sodden, the salvage came into the hands
of Mr. Overall, their indefatigable librarian. In a hired attic,
he hung up the volumes that would bear it over strings like clothes,
to dry, and there for weeks and weeks were the stained,
distorted volumes, often without covers, often in single leaves,
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