| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Death of the Lion by Henry James: intensely interested, and who had no connexion with Mr. Rumble, was
to show how far he could make him go. Poor Paraday, in return, was
naturally to write something somewhere about the young artist. She
played her victims against each other with admirable ingenuity, and
her establishment was a huge machine in which the tiniest and the
biggest wheels went round to the same treadle. I had a scene with
her in which I tried to express that the function of such a man was
to exercise his genius - not to serve as a hoarding for pictorial
posters. The people I was perhaps angriest with were the editors
of magazines who had introduced what they called new features, so
aware were they that the newest feature of all would be to make him
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Statesman by Plato: Er, the son of Armenius, he touches upon the question of freedom and
necessity, both in relation to God and nature. For at first the universe
is governed by the immediate providence of God,--this is the golden age,--
but after a while the wheel is reversed, and man is left to himself. Like
other theologians and philosophers, Plato relegates his explanation of the
problem to a transcendental world; he speaks of what in modern language
might be termed 'impossibilities in the nature of things,' hindering God
from continuing immanent in the world. But there is some inconsistency;
for the 'letting go' is spoken of as a divine act, and is at the same time
attributed to the necessary imperfection of matter; there is also a
numerical necessity for the successive births of souls. At first, man and
Statesman |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Gentle Grafter by O. Henry: sounded like a selection on the xylophone.
"There was about 1,500 grown-up adults in Bird City that had arrived
at years of indiscretion; and the majority of 'em required from three
to twenty drinks a day to make life endurable. The Blue Snake was the
only place where they could get 'em till the flood subsided. It was
beautiful and simple as all truly great swindles are.
"About ten o'clock the silver dollars dropping on the bar slowed down
to playing two-steps and marches instead of jigs. But I looked out the
window and saw a hundred or two of our customers standing in line at
Bird City Savings and Loan Co., and I knew they were borrowing more
money to be sucked in by the clammy tendrils of the octopus.
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