| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Patchwork Girl of Oz by L. Frank Baum: The inhabitants of the Emerald City were polite
people and never jeered at the unfortunate; but it
was so long since they bad seen a prisoner that
they cast many curious looks toward the boy and
many of them hurried away to the royal palace to
be present during the trial.
When Ojo was escorted into the great Throne
Room of the palace he found hundreds of people
assembled there. In the magnificent emerald
throne, which sparkled with countless jewels, sat
Ozma of Oz in her Robe of State, which was
The Patchwork Girl of Oz |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: merely the feeling usually so called, but the mystical contemplation of the
beautiful and the good. The same passion which may wallow in the mire is
capable of rising to the loftiest heights--of penetrating the inmost secret
of philosophy. The highest love is the love not of a person, but of the
highest and purest abstraction. This abstraction is the far-off heaven on
which the eye of the mind is fixed in fond amazement. The unity of truth,
the consistency of the warring elements of the world, the enthusiasm for
knowledge when first beaming upon mankind, the relativity of ideas to the
human mind, and of the human mind to ideas, the faith in the invisible, the
adoration of the eternal nature, are all included, consciously or
unconsciously, in Plato's doctrine of love.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley: now and then he ran against their hawsers, and wondered what they
were, and peeped out, and saw the sailors lounging on board smoking
their pipes; and ducked under again, for he was terribly afraid of
being caught by man and turned into a chimney-sweep once more. He
did not know that the fairies were close to him always, shutting
the sailors' eyes lest they should see him, and turning him aside
from millraces, and sewer-mouths, and all foul and dangerous
things. Poor little fellow, it was a dreary journey for him; and
more than once he longed to be back in Vendale, playing with the
trout in the bright summer sun. But it could not be. What has
been once can never come over again. And people can be little
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