| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Just Folks by Edgar A. Guest: Laughter keeps me strong an' healthy. You can bet I'm all run down,
Fit for doctor folks an' nurses when I cannot shake my frown.
Found in farmin' laughter's useful, good for sheep an' cows an' goats;
When I've laughed my way through summer, reap the biggest crop of oats.
Laughter's good for any business, leastwise so it seems to me
Never knew a smilin' feller but was busy as could be.
Sometimes sit an' think about it, ponderin' on the ways of life,
Wonderin' why mortals gladly face the toil an care an' strife,
Then I come to this conclusion--take it now for what it's worth
It's the joy of laughter keeps us plodding on this stretch of earth.
Men the fun o' life are seeking--that's the reason for the calf
Just Folks |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Dreams & Dust by Don Marquis: Caked shag flanks with slime--
And what are our lives that inherit
The treasures of all time?
Work, and the wooing of woman,
Fight, and the lust of fight,
A little play (and too much toil!)
With an Art that gropes for light;
And now and then a dreamer,
Rapt, from his lonely sod
Looks up and is thrilled and startled
With a fleeting sense of God!
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Alcibiades II by Platonic Imitator: 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
wisdom to discover what the poet would be at. You surely do not suppose
that Homer, the wisest and most divine of poets, was unaware of the
impossibility of knowing a thing badly: for it was no less a person than
he who said of Margites that 'he knew many things, but knew them all
badly.' The solution of the riddle is this, I imagine:--By 'badly' Homer
meant 'bad' and 'knew' stands for 'to know.' Put the words together;--the
metre will suffer, but the poet's meaning is clear;--'Margites knew all
these things, but it was bad for him to know them.' And, obviously, if it
was bad for him to know so many things, he must have been a good-for-
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