| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from What is Man? by Mark Twain: paddle my own bicycle without outside help. It seems incredible,
this celerity of acquirement. It takes considerably longer than
that to learn horseback-riding in the rough.
Now it is true that I could have learned without a teacher,
but it would have been risky for me, because of my natural
clumsiness. The self-taught man seldom knows anything
accurately, and he does not know a tenth as much as he could have
known if he had worked under teachers; and, besides, he brags,
and is the means of fooling other thoughtless people into going
and doing as he himself has done. There are those who imagine
that the unlucky accidents of life--life's "experiences"--are in
What is Man? |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Silas Marner by George Eliot: contradiction. The expression of trusting simplicity in Marner's
face, heightened by that absence of special observation, that
defenceless, deer-like gaze which belongs to large prominent eyes,
was strongly contrasted by the self-complacent suppression of inward
triumph that lurked in the narrow slanting eyes and compressed lips
of William Dane. One of the most frequent topics of conversation
between the two friends was Assurance of salvation: Silas confessed
that he could never arrive at anything higher than hope mingled with
fear, and listened with longing wonder when William declared that he
had possessed unshaken assurance ever since, in the period of his
conversion, he had dreamed that he saw the words "calling and
Silas Marner |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Red Inn by Honore de Balzac: species of birthright. Attracted to the theatre of war before the date
at which they were required to begin their functions, they had
travelled by diligence to Strasburg. Though maternal prudence had only
allowed them a slender sum of money they thought themselves rich in
possessing a few louis, an actual treasure in those days when
assignats were reaching their lowest depreciation and gold was worth
far more than silver. The two young surgeons, about twenty years of
age at the most, yielded themselves up to the poesy of their situation
with all the enthusiasm of youth. Between Strasburg and Bonn they had
visited the Electorate and the banks of the Rhine as artists,
philosophers, and observers. When a man's destiny is scientific he is,
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