| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy: sleek, well-fed, and comely. They rig them out in all manner of
fantastic costumes, wash them, over-feed them, and refuse to make
them work. If the children of the lower orders differ in this
last respect from those of the well-to-do classes, the difference
is merely formal; they work from sheer necessity, and not because
their parents recognize work as a duty. And in over-fed
children, as in over-fed animals, sensuality is engendered
unnaturally early.
Fashionable dress to-day, the course of reading, plays, music,
dances, luscious food, all the elements of our modern life, in a
word, from the pictures on the little boxes of sweetmeats up to
The Kreutzer Sonata |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Twilight Land by Howard Pyle: dreamed of, and the poor man ate as he had never eaten in his
life before.
All the while that the king and the beggar were eating, musicians
played sweet music and dancers danced and singers sang.
Then when the feast was over there came ten young men, bringing
flasks and flagons of all kinds, full of the best wine in the
world; and the beggar drank as he had never drank in his life
before, and until his head spun like a top.
So the king and the beggar feasted and made merry, until at last
the clock struck twelve and the king arose from his seat. "My
friend," said he to the beggar, "all these things have been done
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: square by seven deep, to a fine sand where potatoes would not freeze
in any winter. The sides were left shelving, and not stoned; but
the sun having never shone on them, the sand still keeps its place.
It was but two hours' work. I took particular pleasure in this
breaking of ground, for in almost all latitudes men dig into the
earth for an equable temperature. Under the most splendid house in
the city is still to be found the cellar where they store their
roots as of old, and long after the superstructure has disappeared
posterity remark its dent in the earth. The house is still but a
sort of porch at the entrance of a burrow.
At length, in the beginning of May, with the help of some of my
Walden |
