| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: perplexity, too inarticulate for words, with which he had
acquiesced to her explanations.
These moments were rare with her, however. Her marriage had been
too concrete a misery to be surveyed philosophically. If she had
been unhappy for complex reasons, the unhappiness was as real as
though it had been uncomplicated. Soul is more bruisable than
flesh, and Julia was wounded in every fibre of her spirit. Her
husband's personality seemed to be closing gradually in on her,
obscuring the sky and cutting off the air, till she felt herself
shut up among the decaying bodies of her starved hopes. A sense
of having been decoyed by some world-old conspiracy into this
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Heap O' Livin' by Edgar A. Guest: Through another summer day,
Friend of birds and streams and trees,
That your happiest days are these.
Little do you think to-day,
As you hurry to your play,
That a lot of us, grown old
In the chase for fame and gold,
Watch you as you pass along
Gayly whistling bits of song,
And in envy sit and dream
Of a long-neglected stream,
A Heap O' Livin' |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: will begin to mine.
Reading
With a little more deliberation in the choice of their pursuits,
all men would perhaps become essentially students and observers, for
certainly their nature and destiny are interesting to all alike. In
accumulating property for ourselves or our posterity, in founding a
family or a state, or acquiring fame even, we are mortal; but in
dealing with truth we are immortal, and need fear no change nor
accident. The oldest Egyptian or Hindoo philosopher raised a corner
of the veil from the statue of the divinity; and still the trembling
robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did,
Walden |
