| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: irretrievably damned, since the saved are no longer what they were,
and in hell alone do people retain their sinful nature: that is to
say, their individuality. And this sort of hell, however convenient
as a means of intimidating persons who have practically no honor and
no conscience, is not a fact. Death is for many of us the gate of
hell; but we are inside on the way out, not outside on the way in.
Therefore let us give up telling one another idle stories, and rejoice
in death as we rejoice in birth; for without death we cannot be born
again; and the man who does not wish to be born again and born better
is fit only to represent the City of London in Parliament, or perhaps
the university of Oxford.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson: marriageable women. No one is more romantic. Fame and
honour, the love of young men and the love of mothers, the
business man's pleasure in method, all these and others they
anticipate and rehearse in their play hours. Upon us, who are
further advanced and fairly dealing with the threads of
destiny, they only glance from time to time to glean a hint
for their own mimetic reproduction. Two children playing at
soldiers are far more interesting to each other than one of
the scarlet beings whom both are busy imitating. This is
perhaps the greatest oddity of all. "Art for art" is their
motto; and the doings of grown folk are only interesting as
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Voyage to Abyssinia by Father Lobo: of its waters, and the reason of its overflows.
It is easy to observe how many empty hypotheses and idle reasonings
the phenomena of this river have put mankind to the expense of. Yet
there are people so bigoted to antiquity, as not to pay any regard
to the relation of travellers who have been upon the spot, and by
the evidence of their eyes can confute all that the ancients have
written. It was difficult, it was even impossible, to arrive at the
source of the Nile by tracing its channel from the mouth; and all
who ever attempted it, having been stopped by the cataracts, and
imagining none that followed them could pass farther, have taken the
liberty of entertaining us with their own fictions.
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