| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from What is Man? by Mark Twain: imaginable; for it was here the world itself created the theater
of future antiquities. And it is the only witness with a human
face that was there to see the marvel, and remains to us a
memorial of it.
By 4:40 P.M. the nose of the shadow is perfect and is
beautiful. It is black and is powerfully marked against the
upright canvas of glowing snow, and covers hundreds of acres of
that resplendent surface.
Meantime shadow No. 2 has been creeping out well to the rear
of the face west of it--and at five o'clock has assumed a shape
that has rather a poor and rude semblance of a shoe.
What is Man? |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne by Robert Louis Stevenson: had an offer of twenty-five francs; and before noon, after a
desperate engagement, I sold her, saddle and all, for five-and-
thirty. The pecuniary gain is not obvious, but I had bought
freedom into the bargain.
St Jean du Gard is a large place, and largely Protestant. The
maire, a Protestant, asked me to help him in a small matter which
is itself characteristic of the country. The young women of the
Cevennes profit by the common religion and the difference of the
language to go largely as governesses into England; and here was
one, a native of Mialet, struggling with English circulars from two
different agencies in London. I gave what help I could; and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Simple Soul by Gustave Flaubert: Madame Aubain from the room.
For two nights, Felicite never left the corpse. She would repeat the
same prayers, sprinkle holy water over the sheets, get up, come back
to the bed and contemplate the body. At the end of the first vigil,
she noticed that the face had taken on a yellow tinge, the lips grew
blue, the nose grew pinched, the eyes were sunken. She kissed them
several times and would not have been greatly astonished had Virginia
opened them; to souls like this the supernatural is always quite
simple. She washed her, wrapped her in a shroud, put her into the
casket, laid a wreath of flowers on her head and arranged her curls.
They were blond and of an extraordinary length for her age. Felicite
A Simple Soul |
