| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: several members of the whale family; for these cetaceans agree in so many
characters, great and small, that we cannot doubt that they have inherited
their general shape of body and structure of limbs from a common ancestor.
So it is with fishes.
As members of distinct classes have often been adapted by successive slight
modifications to live under nearly similar circumstances,--to inhabit for
instance the three elements of land, air, and water,--we can perhaps
understand how it is that a numerical parallelism has sometimes been
observed between the sub-groups in distinct classes. A naturalist, struck
by a parallelism of this nature in any one class, by arbitrarily raising or
sinking the value of the groups in other classes (and all our experience
On the Origin of Species |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn: nurse ever makes a mistake about the sanitary conditions of her
neighborhood.
In spite of this perpetual labor no worker remains unkempt: each is
scrupulously neat, making her toilet many times a day. But as every worker
is born with the most beautiful of combs and brushes attached to her
wrists, no time is wasted in the toilet-room. Besides keeping themselves
strictly clean, the workers must also keep their houses and gardens in
faultless order, for the sake of the children. Nothing less than an
earthquake, an eruption, an inundation, or a desperate war, is allowed to
interrupt the daily routine of dusting, sweeping, scrubbing, and
disinfecting.
Kwaidan |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: on the stones, however, in vain; they kept what they concealed; and
if the face of the tomb did become a face for him it was because
her two names became a pair of eyes that didn't know him. He gave
them a last long look, but no palest light broke.
CHAPTER VI
He stayed away, after this, for a year; he visited the depths of
Asia, spending himself on scenes of romantic interest, of
superlative sanctity; but what was present to him everywhere was
that for a man who had known what HE had known the world was vulgar
and vain. The state of mind in which he had lived for so many
years shone out to him, in reflexion, as a light that coloured and
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