| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from New Arabian Nights by Robert Louis Stevenson: duration, a profound disquiet possessed the spirit of the
listeners. Dr. Noel, accustomed as he was to dangerous emotions,
suffered an almost pitiful physical prostration; his breath
whistled in his lungs, his teeth grated one upon another, and his
joints cracked aloud as he nervously shifted his position.
At last a hand was laid upon the door, and the bolt shot back with
a slight report. There followed another pause, during which
Brackenbury could see the Prince draw himself together noiselessly
as if for some unusual exertion. Then the door opened, letting in
a little more of the light of the morning; and the figure of a man
appeared upon the threshold and stood motionless. He was tall, and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Main Street by Sinclair Lewis: His coat was wrinkled; his trousers would flap at the knees
when he arose. His shoes were unblacked, and they were of
an elderly shapelessness. He refused to wear soft hats;
cleaved to a hard derby, as a symbol of virility and
prosperity; and sometimes he forgot to take it off in the house.
She peeped at his cuffs. They were frayed in prickles of
starched linen. She had turned them once; she clipped them
every week; but when she had begged him to throw the
shirt away, last Sunday morning at the crisis of the weekly
bath, he had uneasily protested, "Oh, it'll wear quite a while
yet."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Forged Coupon by Leo Tolstoy: Yet Tolstoy found true idealism in the toiling
peasant who believed in God, rather than in his
intellectual superior who believed in himself in the
first place, and gave a conventional assent to the
existence of a deity in the second. For the peas-
ant was still religious at heart with a naive unques-
tioning faith--more characteristic of the four-
teenth or fifteenth century than of to-day--and
still fervently aspired to God although sunk in su-
perstition and held down by the despotism of the
Greek Church. It was the cumbrous ritual and
The Forged Coupon |
