| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Republic by Plato: great ideas, such as liberty, or equality, or the greatest happiness of the
greatest number, or the brotherhood of humanity, and they no longer care to
consider how these ideas must be limited in practice or harmonized with the
conditions of human life. They are full of light, but the light to them
has become only a sort of luminous mist or blindness. Almost every one has
known some enthusiastic half-educated person, who sees everything at false
distances, and in erroneous proportions.
With this disorder of eyesight may be contrasted another--of those who see
not far into the distance, but what is near only; who have been engaged all
their lives in a trade or a profession; who are limited to a set or sect of
their own. Men of this kind have no universal except their own interests
The Republic |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs: the latter's wonderful quickness and agility.
In the sum total of their points, however, the anthropoid
had a shade the better of the battle, and had there been no
other personal attribute to influence the final outcome,
Tarzan of the Apes, the young Lord Greystoke, would have died
as he had lived--an unknown savage beast in equatorial Africa.
But there was that which had raised him far above his fellows
of the jungle--that little spark which spells the whole
vast difference between man and brute--Reason. This it was
which saved him from death beneath the iron muscles and
tearing fangs of Terkoz.
Tarzan of the Apes |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: group of writers of the Sovreménnik&sup4; circle in 1856,
with Turgénieff, Ostróvsky, Gontcharóf,
Grigoróvitch, Druzhínin, and my father, quite young
still, without a beard, and in uniform.
My father used to come out of his bedroom of a morning--it
was in a corner on the top floor--in his dressing-gown, with his
beard uncombed and tumbled together, and go down to dress.
Soon after he would issue from his study fresh and vigorous,
in a gray smock-frock, and would go up into the zala for
breakfast. That was our déjeuner.
When there was nobody staying in the house, he would not
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