| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from La Grenadiere by Honore de Balzac: "But why should I curse you some day, mother?"
"Some day," she said, kissing him on the forehead, "you will find out
that I have wronged you. I am going to leave you, here, without money,
without"--and she hesitated--"without a father," she added, and at the
word she burst into tears and put the boy from her gently. A sort of
intuition told Louis that his mother wished to be alone, and he
carried off Marie, now half awake. An hour later, when his brother was
in bed, he stole down and out to the summer-house where his mother was
sitting.
"Louis! come here."
The words were spoken in tones delicious to his heart. The boy sprang
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Jungle by Upton Sinclair: little heat anywhere in the building, except in the cooking rooms and
such places--and it was the men who worked in these who ran the most
risk of all, because whenever they had to pass to another room they
had to go through ice-cold corridors, and sometimes with nothing on
above the waist except a sleeveless undershirt. On the killing beds
you were apt to be covered with blood, and it would freeze solid; if you
leaned against a pillar, you would freeze to that, and if you put your
hand upon the blade of your knife, you would run a chance of leaving
your skin on it. The men would tie up their feet in newspapers and old
sacks, and these would be soaked in blood and frozen, and then soaked
again, and so on, until by nighttime a man would be walking on great
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: of clear sight. He is the declared enemy of all living by
reflex action, of all that is done betwixt sleep and waking,
of all the pleasureless pleasurings and imaginary duties in
which we coin away our hearts and fritter invaluable years.
He has to electrify his readers into an instant unflagging
activity, founded on a wide and eager observation of the
world, and make them direct their ways by a superior
prudence, which has little or nothing in common with the
maxims of the copy-book. That many of us lead such lives as
they would heartily disown after two hours' serious
reflection on the subject is, I am afraid, a true, and, I am
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