| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Adieu by Honore de Balzac: thinking perhaps, as simple characters are apt to think, that there
was something immodest in unveiling griefs when human language cannot
render their depths and may only rouse the mockery of those who do not
comprehend them. Monsieur d'Albon had one of those delicate natures
which divine sorrows, and are instantly sympathetic to the emotion
they have involuntarily aroused. He respected his friend's silence,
rose, forgot his fatigue, and followed him silently, grieved to have
touched a wound that was evidently not healed.
"Some day, my friend," said Philippe, pressing his hand, and thanking
him for his mute repentance by a heart-rending look, "I will relate to
you my life. To-day I cannot."
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau: the voices of old burghers that I heard in the streets. I
was an involuntary spectator and auditor of whatever was
done and said in the kitchen of the adjacent village inn--a
wholly new and rare experience to me. It was a closer view
of my native town. I was fairly inside of it. I never had
seen its institutions before. This is one of its peculiar
institutions; for it is a shire town. I began to comprehend
what its inhabitants were about.
In the morning, our breakfasts were put through the hole
in the door, in small oblong-square tin pans, made to fit,
and holding a pint of chocolate, with brown bread, and
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis: as--it's hot as--it's hotter 'n the hinges of Hades! Look! You can see the
mark!"
So, as they drove up to St. Mary's Hospital, with the nurses already laying
out the instruments for an operation to save her life, it was she who consoled
him and kissed the place to make it well, and though he tried to be gruff and
mature, he yielded to her and was glad to be babied.
The ambulance whirled under the hooded carriage-entrance of the hospital, and
instantly he was reduced to a zero in the nightmare succession of cork-floored
halls, endless doors open on old women sitting up in bed, an elevator, the
anesthetizing room, a young interne contemptuous of husbands. He was
permitted to kiss his wife; he saw a thin dark nurse fit the cone over her
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