| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau: for, such as a great many have described them; seen from a
higher still, and the highest, who shall say what they are,
or that they are worth looking at or thinking of at all?
However, the government does not concern me much, and I shall
bestow the fewest possible thoughts on it. It is not many
moments that I live under a government, even in this world.
If a man is thought-free, fancy-free, imagination-free,
that which is not never for a long time appearing to be
to him, unwise rulers or reformers cannot fatally interrupt him.
I know that most men think differently from myself; but
those whose lives are by profession devoted to the study of
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: large fires are no longer necessary. I am on the alert for the
first signs of spring, to hear the chance note of some arriving
bird, or the striped squirrel's chirp, for his stores must be now
nearly exhausted, or see the woodchuck venture out of his winter
quarters. On the 13th of March, after I had heard the bluebird,
song sparrow, and red-wing, the ice was still nearly a foot thick.
As the weather grew warmer it was not sensibly worn away by the
water, nor broken up and floated off as in rivers, but, though it
was completely melted for half a rod in width about the shore, the
middle was merely honeycombed and saturated with water, so that you
could put your foot through it when six inches thick; but by the
Walden |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Voyage to Abyssinia by Father Lobo: through the Red Sea on dry land; and there is some reason for
imagining the tradition not ill grounded, for the sea is here only
three leagues in breadth. All the ground about Toro is barren for
want of water, which is only to be found at a considerable distance,
in one fountain, which flows out of the neighbouring mountains, at
the foot of which there are still twelve palm-trees. Near Toro are
several wells, which, as the Arabs tell us, were dug by the order of
Moses to quiet the clamours of the thirsty Israelites. Suez lies in
the bottom of the Gulf, three leagues from Toro, once a place of
note, now reduced, under the Turks, to an inconsiderable village,
where the miserable inhabitants are forced to fetch water at three
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