| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories by Mark Twain: published death-notices a little verse or two of comforting poetry.
Any one who is in the habit of reading the daily Philadelphia
LEDGER must frequently be touched by these plaintive tributes
to extinguished worth. In Philadelphia, the departure of a child
is a circumstance which is not more surely followed by a burial
than by the accustomed solacing poesy in the PUBLIC LEDGER.
In that city death loses half its terror because the knowledge
of its presence comes thus disguised in the sweet drapery of verse.
For instance, in a late LEDGER I find the following (I change
the surname):
DIED
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Forged Coupon by Leo Tolstoy: father without blinking.
From a door near them an official, an officer, a
doctor, and a clerk with documents, entered.
After them came a soldier, the one who had shot
the man. He stepped briskly along behind his
superiors, but the instant he saw the corpse he
went suddenly pale, and quivered; and dropping
his head stood still. When the official asked him
whether that was the man who was escaping across
the frontier, and at whom he had fired, he was
unable to answer. His lips trembled, and his
The Forged Coupon |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske: when we reflect upon the circumstance that so many able and
brilliant men are collected in one city, where their minds may
continually and directly react upon each other. It is from the
lack of such personal stimulus that it is difficult or indeed
wellnigh impossible, even for those whose resources are such as
to give them an extensive command of books, to keep up to the
highest level of contemporary culture while living in a village
or provincial town. And it is mainly because of the personal
stimulus which it affords to its students, that a great
university, as a seat of culture, is immeasurably superior to a
small one.
The Unseen World and Other Essays |
