| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: any kind of personal saliency. Cleverness was useful in business;
but in society it seemed to him as futile as the sham cascades
formed by a stream that might have been used to drive a mill. He
liked the collective point of view that goes with the civilized
uniformity of dress-clothes, and his wife's attitude implied the
same preference; yet they found themselves slipping more and more
into Flamel's intimacy. Alexa had once or twice said that she
enjoyed meeting clever people; but her enjoyment took the negative
form of a smiling receptivity; and Glennard felt a growing
preference for the kind of people who have their thinking done for
them by the community.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Main Street by Sinclair Lewis: sacrifice to her opinionation and to his cautious desire for
prosperity.
"But it would be worse if he were like Sam Clark--
insisted on having children," she considered; then,
"If Will were the Prince, wouldn't I DEMAND his child?"
Kennicott's land-deals were both financial advancement and
favorite game. Driving through the country, he noticed which
farms had good crops; he heard the news about the restless
farmer who was "thinking about selling out here and pulling
his freight for Alberta." He asked the veterinarian about the
value of different breeds of stock; he inquired of Lyman Cass
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Master Key by L. Frank Baum: through the intervening space toward the sidewalk far below.
Terrified though he was by the sudden disaster, the boy had still wit
enough remaining to reach out his right hand and move the indicator of
the machine upon his left wrist to the zero mark. Immediately he
paused in his fearful flight and presently came to a stop at a
distance of less than fifteen feet from the flagstones which had
threatened to crush out his life.
As he stared downward, trying to recover his self-possession, he saw
the old gentleman he had met on the Lake Front standing just below
and looking at him with a half frightened, half curious expression
in his eyes.
The Master Key |
