| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken: We crowd through the streets in a dazzle of pallid lamplight,
We pour in a sinister wave, ascend a stair,
With laughter and cry, and word upon murmured word;
We flow, we descend, we turn . . . and the eternal dreamer
Moves among us like light, like evening air . . .
Good-night! Good-night! Good-night! We go our ways,
The rain runs over the pavement before our feet,
The cold rain falls, the rain sings.
We walk, we run, we ride. We turn our faces
To what the eternal evening brings.
Our hands are hot and raw with the stones we have laid,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Country Doctor by Honore de Balzac: Benassis stopped his horse as he answered. "Perhaps you will not share
in the feelings of interest awakened in me by La Fosseuse. Her fate is
like my own; we have both alike missed our vocation; it is the
similarity of our lots that occasions my sympathy for her and the
feelings that I experience at the sight of her. You either followed
your natural bent when you entered upon a military career, or you took
a liking for your calling after you had adopted it, otherwise you
would not have borne the heavy yoke of military discipline till now;
you, therefore, cannot understand the sorrows of a soul that must
always feel renewed within it the stir of longings that can never be
realized; nor the pining existence of a creature forced to live in an
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin: the street towards the river; and I found his voice distinct till I
came near Front-street, when some noise in that street obscur'd it.
Imagining then a semi-circle, of which my distance should be the radius,
and that it were fill'd with auditors, to each of whom I allow'd
two square feet, I computed that he might well be heard by more
than thirty thousand. This reconcil'd me to the newspaper accounts
of his having preach'd to twenty-five thousand people in the fields,
and to the antient histories of generals haranguing whole armies,
of which I had sometimes doubted.
By hearing him often, I came to distinguish easily between sermons
newly compos'd, and those which he had often preach'd in the course
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin |
