| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson: 'Now there is the fallacy,' cried Somerset. 'There I catch
the secret of your futility in life. The world teems and
bubbles with adventure; it besieges you along the street:
hands waving out of windows, swindlers coming up and swearing
they knew you when you were abroad, affable and doubtful
people of all sorts and conditions begging and truckling for
your notice. But not you: you turn away, you walk your
seedy mill round, you must go the dullest way. Now here, I
beg of you, the next adventure that offers itself, embrace it
in with both your arms; whatever it looks, grimy or romantic,
grasp it. I will do the like; the devil is in it, but at
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Agesilaus by Xenophon: And in these matters he was not like a man who chances upon a treasure
and thereby becomes wealthier, albeit none the more skilful in
economy; nor yet like him who, when a plague has fallen upon an enemy,
wrests a victory, whereby he may add to his reputation for success,
but not for strategy. Rather was his example that of one who in each
emergency will take the lead; at a crisis where toil is needful, by
endurance; or in the battle-lists of bravery by prowess; or when the
function of the counsellor is uppermost, by the soundness of his
judgment. Of such a man I say, he has obtained by warrant indefeasible
the title peerless.
And if, as a means towards good workmanship, we count among the noble
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates by Howard Pyle: flung themselves from the castle walls into the river or upon the
rocks beneath, preferring death to capture and possible torture;
many who were left were put to the sword, and some few were
spared and held as prisoners.
So fell the castle of Chagres, and nothing now lay between the
buccaneers and the city of Panama but the intervening and
trackless forests.
And now the name of the town whose doom was sealed was no secret.
Up the river of Chagres went Capt. Henry Morgan and twelve
hundred men, packed closely in their canoes; they never stopped,
saving now and then to rest their stiffened legs, until they had
Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates |
