| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln: We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place
for those who here gave their lives that this nation might live.
It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate. . .we cannot consecrate. . .
we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead,
who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power
to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember,
what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished
work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from When a Man Marries by Mary Roberts Rinehart: even the nurse shared in the excitement and gave Jim the medicine
she had prepared for Tom.
Then we all sat down and had some champagne, and while they were
waiting for the police wagon, they gave some to poor McGuirk. He
was still quite shaken from his experience when the dumb-waiter
stuck. The wine cheered him a little, and he told his story, in a
voice that was creaky from disuse, while Tom held my hand under
the table.
He had had a dreadful week, he said; he spent his days in a
closet in one of the maids' rooms--the one where we had put Jim.
It was Jim waking out of a nap and declaring that the closet door
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Alcibiades II by Platonic Imitator: '...Full many a thing he knew;
But knew them all badly.' (A fragment from the pseudo-Homeric poem,
'Margites.')
ALCIBIADES: How in the world, Socrates, do the words of the poet apply to
him? They seem to me to have no bearing on the point whatever.
SOCRATES: Quite the contrary, my sweet friend: only the poet is talking
in riddles after the fashion of his tribe. For all poetry has by nature an
enigmatical character, and it is by no means everybody who can interpret
it. And if, moreover, the spirit of poetry happen to seize on a man who is
of a begrudging temper and does not care to manifest his wisdom but keeps
it to himself as far as he can, it does indeed require an almost superhuman
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