| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Ivanhoe by Walter Scott: a couple of the gold pieces which it contained, he
pursued his career round the lists, leaving the Jew
to the derision of those around him, and himself
receiving as much applause from the spectators as
if he had done some honest and honourable action.
CHAPTER VIII
At this the challenger with fierce defy
His trumpet sounds; the challenged makes reply:
With clangour rings the field, resounds the vaulted sky.
Their visors closed, their lances in the rest,
Or at the helmet pointed or the crest,
Ivanhoe |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Island Nights' Entertainments by Robert Louis Stevenson: and fights, leaping and hewing with the empty air? Even so the
man-eaters huddled back to back, and heaved up their axes, and laid
on, and screamed as they laid on, and behold! no man to contend
with them! only here and there Keola saw an axe swinging over
against them without hands; and time and again a man of the tribe
would fall before it, clove in twain or burst asunder, and his soul
sped howling.
For awhile Keola looked upon this prodigy like one that dreams, and
then fear took him by the midst as sharp as death, that he should
behold such doings. Even in that same flash the high chief of the
clan espied him standing, and pointed and called out his name.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Reason Discourse by Rene Descartes: to the faith in which, by the grace of God, I had been educated from my
childhood and regulating my conduct in every other matter according to the
most moderate opinions, and the farthest removed from extremes, which
should happen to be adopted in practice with general consent of the most
judicious of those among whom I might be living. For as I had from that
time begun to hold my own opinions for nought because I wished to subject
them all to examination, I was convinced that I could not do better than
follow in the meantime the opinions of the most judicious; and although
there are some perhaps among the Persians and Chinese as judicious as
among ourselves, expediency seemed to dictate that I should regulate my
practice conformably to the opinions of those with whom I should have to
Reason Discourse |
