| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: spectacles and read several Psalms. His voice was so
sympathetic and he read so interestingly that I wished he had
chosen one of my favourite chapters in the Book of Kings.
I was awed by his intonation of the word `Selah.' `He shall
choose our inheritance for us, the excellency of Jacob whom
He loved. Selah.' I had no idea what the word meant;
perhaps he had not. But, as he uttered it, it became oracular,
the most sacred of words.
Early the next morning I ran out-of-doors to look about me.
I had been told that ours was the only wooden house west
of Black Hawk--until you came to the Norwegian settlement,
My Antonia |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Vicar of Tours by Honore de Balzac: their faded features. Mademoiselle de Sombreuil was neither wife nor
maid; she was and ever will be a living poem. Mademoiselle Salomon de
Villenoix belonged to the race of these heroic beings. Her devotion
was religiously sublime, inasmuch as it won her no glory after being,
for years, a daily agony. Beautiful and young, she loved and was
beloved; her lover lost his reason. For five years she gave herself,
with love's devotion, to the mere mechanical well-being of that
unhappy man, whose madness she so penetrated that she never believed
him mad. She was simple in manner, frank in speech, and her pallid
face was not lacking in strength and character, though its features
were regular. She never spoke of the events of her life. But at times
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Padre Ignacio by Owen Wister: with other men on the shore. Seeing the priest slowly coming, this
stranger approached to meet him.
"You are connected with the mission here?" he inquired.
"I--am."
"Perhaps it is with you that Gaston Villere stopped?"
"The young man from New Orleans? Yes. I am Padre Ignacio."
"Then you'll save me a journey. I promised him to deliver these into your
own hands."
The stranger gave them to him.
"A bag of gold-dust," he explained, "and a letter. I wrote it at his
dictation while he was dying. He lived hardly an hour afterward."
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