| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Voyage to Abyssinia by Father Lobo: asses to carry our baggage. The first day's march was not above a
league, and the others not much longer. Our guides performed their
office very ill, being influenced, as we imagined, by the Chec Furt,
an officer, whom, though unwilling, we were forced to take with us.
This man, who might have brought us to the king in three days, led
us out of the way through horrid deserts destitute of water, or
where what we found was so foul, nauseous, and offensive, that it
excited a loathing and aversion which nothing but extreme necessity
could have overcome.
Having travelled some days, we were met by the King's brother, to
whom, by the advice of Chec Furt, whose intent in following us was
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from An International Episode by Henry James: On the morrow, their first thought was that they would re-embark that day
for England; and then it occured to them that they might find an asylum
nearer at hand. The cave of Aeolus became their ideal of comfort,
and they wondered where the Americans went when they wished to cool off.
They had not the least idea, and they determined to apply for information
to Mr. J. L. Westgate. This was the name inscribed in a bold hand on the back
of a letter carefully preserved in the pocketbook of our junior traveler.
Beneath the address, in the left-hand corner of the envelope,
were the words, "Introducing Lord Lambeth and Percy Beaumont, Esq."
The letter had been given to the two Englishmen by a good friend
of theirs in London, who had been in America two years previously,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: power to imagine things as they are without actually sensing them; and
this I will call the realistic imagination. Take for example marriage
and war. One man has a vision of perpetual bliss with a domestic
angel at home, and of flashing sabres, thundering guns, victorious
cavalry charges, and routed enemies in the field. That is romantic
imagination; and the mischief it does is incalculable. It begins in
silly and selfish expectations of the impossible, and ends in spiteful
disappointment, sour grievance, cynicism, and misanthropic resistance
to any attempt to better a hopeless world. The wise man knows that
imagination is not only a means of pleasing himself and beguiling
tedious hours with romances and fairy tales and fools' paradises (a
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