| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Inaugural Address by John F. Kennedy: All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days.
Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days. . .
nor in the life of this administration, nor even perhaps
in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.
In your hands, my fellow citizens. . .more than mine. . .will rest the
final success or failure of our course. Since this country was founded,
each generation of Americans has been summoned to give testimony
to its national loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered
the call to service surround the globe. Now the trumpet summons us again. . .
not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need. . .not as a call to battle. . .
though embattled we are. . .but a call to bear the burden of a long
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: (compare Arist. Pol.). And if we are not obedient to the gods, there is a
danger that we shall be split up again and go about in basso-relievo, like
the profile figures having only half a nose which are sculptured on
monuments, and that we shall be like tallies. Wherefore let us exhort all
men to piety, that we may avoid evil, and obtain the good, of which Love is
to us the lord and minister; and let no one oppose him--he is the enemy of
the gods who opposes him. For if we are friends of the God and at peace
with him we shall find our own true loves, which rarely happens in this
world at present. I am serious, and therefore I must beg Eryximachus not
to make fun or to find any allusion in what I am saying to Pausanias and
Agathon, who, as I suspect, are both of the manly nature, and belong to the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Enemies of Books by William Blades: Unlike the destroyer Bagford, he has no useful object in view,
but simply follows a senseless kind of classification. For instance:
One set of volumes contains nothing but copper-plate engraved titles,
and woe betide the grand old Dutch folios of the seventeenth century
if they cross his path. Another is a volume of coarse or quaint titles,
which certainly answer the end of showing how idiotic and conceited
some authors have been. Here you find Dr. Sib's "Bowels opened
in Divers Sermons," 1650, cheek by jowl with the discourse attributed
falsely to Huntington, the Calvinist, "Die and be damned,"
with many others too coarse to be quoted. The odd titles adopted
for his poems by Taylor, the water-poet, enliven several pages,
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