| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Burning Daylight by Jack London: and slaves in early New England.
"He's sure the real thing," he told one of his fellow-clubmen
afterwards, in the smoking-room of the Alta-Pacific. "I tell
you, Gallon, he was a genuine surprise to me. I knew the big
ones had to be like that, but I had to see him to really know it.
He's one of the fellows that does things. You can see it
sticking out all over him. He's one in a thousand, that's
straight, a man to tie to. There's no limit to any game he
plays, and you can stack on it that he plays right up to the
handle. I bet he can lose or win half a dozen million without
batting an eye."
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: of numbers. First, they applied to external nature the relations of them
which they found in their own minds; and where nature seemed to be at
variance with number, as for example in the case of fractions, they
protested against her (Rep.; Arist. Metaph.). Having long meditated on the
properties of 1:2:4:8, or 1:3:9:27, or of 3, 4, 5, they discovered in them
many curious correspondences and were disposed to find in them the secret
of the universe. Secondly, they applied number and figure equally to those
parts of physics, such as astronomy or mechanics, in which the modern
philosopher expects to find them, and to those in which he would never
think of looking for them, such as physiology and psychology. For the
sciences were not yet divided, and there was nothing really irrational in
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gobseck by Honore de Balzac: room. A host of objects required in illness--rows of medicine bottles,
empty and full, most of them dirty, crumpled linen, and broken plates,
littered the writing-table, chairs, and chimney-piece. An open
warming-pan lay on the floor before the grate; a bath, still full of
mineral water had not been taken away. The sense of coming dissolution
pervaded all the details of an unsightly chaos. Signs of death
appeared in things inanimate before the Destroyer came to the body on
the bed. The Comte de Restaud could not bear the daylight, the
Venetian shutters were closed, darkness deepened the gloom in the
dismal chamber. The sick man himself had wasted greatly. All the life
in him seemed to have taken refuge in the still brilliant eyes. The
Gobseck |
