| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac: than conceited fops, men of the world, diplomatists, and even
soldiers, although such beings have nothing else to do. She was a
connoisseur, and knew very well that the capacity for love reveals
itself chiefly in mere nothings. A woman well informed in such matters
can read her future in a simple gesture; just as Cuvier could say from
the fragment of a bone: This belonged to an animal of such or such
dimensions, with or without horns, carnivorous, herbivorous,
amphibious, etc., age, so many thousand years. Sure now of finding in
d'Arthez as much imagination in love as there was in his written
style, she thought it wise to bring him up at once to the highest
pitch of passion and belief.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne: "To work!" cried Cyrus Harding.
The engineer's thought was at once understood. it might be possible to
dam, as it were, the torrent, and thus compel it to pour itself into the
lake.
The colonists hastened to the dockyard. They returned with shovels,
picks, axes, and by means of banking the earth with the aid of fallen trees
they succeeded in a few hours in raising an embankment three feet high and
some hundreds of paces in length. It seemed to them, when they had
finished, as if they had scarcely been working more than a few minutes.
It was not a moment too soon. The liquefied substances soon after reached
the bottom of the barrier. The stream of lava swelled like a river about to
The Mysterious Island |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Iron Puddler by James J. Davis: day when I awake from some bad dream, it is a dream that I am
wearing crazy breeches and all the world is jeering at me. It has
made me tender toward poor children who have to wear hand-me-
downs.
To-day psychologists talk much of the "inferiority complex"
which spurs a man forward to outdo himself. But Babe Durgon and I
didn't go into these matters as we trudged along through the dark
on our way to do battle "over the line." At the foot of the hill,
Babe exclaimed:
"What's the use of going any farther? Let's fight here." It was
in front of a new building--a church-school half completed. We
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