| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Reason Discourse by Rene Descartes: to believe that by their help a clear and certain knowledge of all that is
useful in life might be acquired, I was ardently desirous of instruction.
But as soon as I had finished the entire course of study, at the close of
which it is customary to be admitted into the order of the learned, I
completely changed my opinion. For I found myself involved in so many
doubts and errors, that I was convinced I had advanced no farther in all
my attempts at learning, than the discovery at every turn of my own
ignorance. And yet I was studying in one of the most celebrated schools in
Europe, in which I thought there must be learned men, if such were
anywhere to be found. I had been taught all that others learned there;
and not contented with the sciences actually taught us, I had, in
Reason Discourse |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Chita: A Memory of Last Island by Lafcadio Hearn: little Virgin with an Indian face, brought home by Feliu as a
gift after one of his Mexican voyages,--Carmen Viosca had burned
candles and prayed; sometimes telling her beads; sometimes
murmuring the litanies she knew by heart; sometimes also reading
from a prayer-book worn and greasy as a long-used pack of cards.
It was particularly stained at one page, a page on which her
tears had fallen many a lonely night--a page with a clumsy wood
cut representing a celestial lamp, a symbolic radiance, shining
through darkness, and on either side a kneeling angel with folded
wings. And beneath this rudely wrought symbol of the Perpetual
Calm appeared in big, coarse type the title of a prayer that has
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Court Life in China by Isaac Taylor Headland: the imperial troops were paralyzed with fear and never dared to
meet them in the open field. Thousands of common thieves and
robbers flocked to their standards with every new conquest,
impelled by no higher motive than that of pillage and gain.
Rumours became rife in every village and hamlet, and as they
neared the capital the wildest tales were told in every nook and
corner of the city, from the palace of the young Emperor in the
Forbidden City to the mat shed of the meanest beggar beneath the
city wall.
My wife says: "I remember just after going to China, sitting one
evening on a kang, or brick bed, with Yin-ma, an old nurse, our
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