| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Agesilaus by Xenophon: he would trample the Hellenes under the hoofs of his horses long
before they reached the district where no cavalry could operate.
But Agesilaus, instead of advancing upon Caria, turned right about and
marched in the direction of Phrygia. Picking up the various forces
that met him on his progress, he passed onwards, laying city after
city at his feet, and by the suddenness of his incursion capturing
enormous wealth.
Here was an achievement which showed the genius of a general, as all
agreed. When once war as declared, and the arts of circumvention and
deceit were thereby justified, he had proved Tissaphernes to be a very
bade in subtlety;[9] and with what sagacity again did he turn the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Mosses From An Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne: the garden. But few as the moments were, it seemed to Giovanni,
when she was on the point of vanishing beneath the sculptured
portal, that his beautiful bouquet was already beginning to
wither in her grasp. It was an idle thought; there could be no
possibility of distinguishing a faded flower from a fresh one at
so great a distance.
For many days after this incident the young man avoided the
window that looked into Dr. Rappaccini's garden, as if something
ugly and monstrous would have blasted his eyesight had he been
betrayed into a glance. He felt conscious of having put himself,
to a certain extent, within the influence of an unintelligible
Mosses From An Old Manse |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: continent, and such as were in keeping with the times. Once the new
social establishment was set on foot, the antediluvian giants vanished,
and, along with them, the resuscitated Roman world--the Brutuses,
Gracchi, Publicolas, the Tribunes, the Senators, and Caesar himself. In
its sober reality, bourgeois society had produced its own true
interpretation in the Says, Cousins, Royer-Collards, Benjamin Constants
and Guizots; its real generals sat behind the office desks; and the
mutton-head of Louis XVIII was its political lead. Wholly absorbed in
the production of wealth and in the peaceful fight of competition, this
society could no longer understand that the ghosts of the days of Rome
had watched over its cradle. And yet, lacking in heroism as bourgeois
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