| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: specific kind of interested excitement, and gathers a certain
group of ideas together in subordination to it as its associates;
and if the aims and excitements are distinct in kind, their
groups of ideas may have little in common. When one group is
present and engrosses the interest, all the ideas connected with
other groups may be excluded from the mental field. The
President of the United States when, with paddle, gun, and
fishing-rod, he goes camping in the wilderness for a vacation,
changes his system of ideas from top to bottom. The presidential
anxieties have lapsed into the background entirely; the official
habits are replaced by the habits of a son of nature, and those
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Ozma of Oz by L. Frank Baum: the first room the girl waved her hand, as she had seen the King do,
and commanded the Tin Woodman, whatever form he might then have, to
resume his proper shape. No result followed this attempt, so Dorothy
went into another room and repeated it, and so through all the rooms
of the palace. Yet the Tin Woodman did not appear to them, nor could
they imagine which among the thousands of ornaments was their
transformed friend.
Sadly they returned to the throne room, where the King, seeing that
they had met with failure, jeered at Dorothy, saying:
"You do not know how to use my belt, so it is of no use to you. Give
it back to me and I will let you go free--you and all the people who
Ozma of Oz |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau by Honore de Balzac: merchants surrounded him and gave him an /ovation boursiere/. He was
overwhelmed with flattering compliments and grasped by the hand, which
roused some jealousy and caused some remorse; for out of every hundred
persons walking about that hall fifty at least had "liquidated" their
affairs. Gigonnet and Gobseck, who were talking together in a corner,
looked at the man of commercial honor very much as a naturalist must
have looked at the first electric-eel that was ever brought to him,--a
fish armed with the power of a Leyden jar, which is the greatest
curiosity of the animal kingdom. After inhaling the incense of his
triumph, Cesar got into the coach to go to his own home, where the
marriage contract of his dear Cesarine and the devoted Popinot was
Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau |
