| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Enemies of Books by William Blades: Here they formed a nest for their young ones by descending to
the library shelves and biting away the leaves of various books.
Snug and comfortable was the little household, until, one day,
the builder's men having finished, the poles were removed, and--
alas! for the rats--the hole was closed up with bricks and cement.
Buried alive, the father and mother, with five or six of their
offspring, met with a speedy death, and not until a few years ago,
when a restoration of the Chapter House was effected, was the rat
grave opened again for a scaffold pole, and all their skeletons
and their nest discovered. Their bones and paper fragments
of the nest may now be seen in a glass case in the Chapter House,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Dead Souls by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: late years, lost many of your peasants by death?"
"Yes; no fewer than eighteen," responded the old lady with a sigh.
"Such a fine lot, too--all good workers! True, others have since grown
up, but of what use are THEY? Mere striplings. When the Assessor
last called upon me I could have wept; for, though those workmen of
mine are dead, I have to keep on paying for them as though they were
still alive! And only last week my blacksmith got burnt to death! Such
a clever hand at his trade he was!"
"What? A fire occurred at your place?"
"No, no, God preserve us all! It was not so bad as that. You must
understand that the blacksmith SET HIMSELF on fire--he got set on
Dead Souls |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: introduction of the supernatural in very small quantities into
history on account of the extremely good effect it would have on
pious people.
But perhaps there is no passage in the whole of ancient and modern
history which breathes such a manly and splendid spirit of
rationalism as one preserved to us in the Vatican - strange
resting-place for it! - in which he treats of the terrible decay of
population which had fallen on his native land in his own day, and
which by the general orthodox public was regarded as a special
judgment of God sending childlessness on women as a punishment for
the sins of the people. For it was a disaster quite without
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