| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Alcibiades I by Plato: Messenian pastures. But I have said enough of this: and as to gold and
silver, there is more of them in Lacedaemon than in all the rest of Hellas,
for during many generations gold has been always flowing in to them from
the whole Hellenic world, and often from the barbarian also, and never
going out, as in the fable of Aesop the fox said to the lion, 'The prints
of the feet of those going in are distinct enough;' but who ever saw the
trace of money going out of Lacedaemon? And therefore you may safely infer
that the inhabitants are the richest of the Hellenes in gold and silver,
and that their kings are the richest of them, for they have a larger share
of these things, and they have also a tribute paid to them which is very
considerable. Yet the Spartan wealth, though great in comparison of the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Three Taverns by Edwin Arlington Robinson: I might as well have been the sound of rain,
A wind among the cedars, or a bird;
Or nothing. Mary, make him look at you;
And even if he should say that we are nothing,
To know that you have heard him will be something.
And yet he loved us, and it was for love
The Master gave him back. Why did He wait
So long before He came? Why did He weep?
I thought He would be glad -- and Lazarus --
To see us all again as He had left us --
All as it was, all as it was before."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Walking by Henry David Thoreau: in a meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last,
just before setting, after a cold, gray day, reached a clear
stratum in the horizon, and the softest, brightest morning
sunlight fell on the dry grass and on the stems of the trees in
the opposite horizon and on the leaves of the shrub oaks on the
hillside, while our shadows stretched long over the meadow east-
ward, as if we were the only motes in its beams. It was such a
light as we could not have imagined a moment before, and the air
also was so warm and serene that nothing was wanting to make a
paradise of that meadow. When we reflected that this was not a
solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would
Walking |
