| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Desert Gold by Zane Grey: facing eternity. But that was what gave him strength to endure.
Somehow he was a part of it all, some atom in that vastness,
somehow necessary to an inscrutable purpose, something
indestructible in that desolate world of ruin and death and decay,
something perishable and changeable and growing under all the
fixity of heaven. In that endless, silent hall of desert there
was a spirit; and Cameron felt hovering near him what he imagined
to be phantoms of peace.
He returned to camp and sought his comrade.
"I reckon we're two of a kind," he said. "It was a woman who drove
me into the desert. But I come to remember. The desert's the only
Desert Gold |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Troll Garden and Selected Stories by Willa Cather: placed on the table with an air of ceremony, and, going behind
Nils, held the flask between him and the sun, squinting into it
admiringly. "You know dis, Tokai? A great friend of mine, he
bring dis to me, a present out of Hongarie. You know how much it
cost, dis wine? Chust so much what it weigh in gold. Nobody but
de nobles drink him in Bohemie. Many, many years I save him up,
dis Tokai." Joe whipped out his official corkscrew and delicately
removed the cork. "De old man die what bring him to me, an' dis
wine he lay on his belly in my cellar an' sleep. An' now,"
carefully pouring out the heavy yellow wine, "an' now he wake up;
and maybe he wake us up, too!" He carried one of the glasses to
The Troll Garden and Selected Stories |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Altar of the Dead by Henry James: He had known her twenty years, and she was the only woman for whom
he might perhaps have been unfaithful. She was all cleverness and
sympathy and charm; her house had been the very easiest in all the
world and her friendship the very firmest. Without accidents he
had loved her, without accidents every one had loved her: she had
made the passions about her as regular as the moon makes the tides.
She had been also of course far too good for her husband, but he
never suspected it, and in nothing had she been more admirable than
in the exquisite art with which she tried to keep every one else
(keeping Creston was no trouble) from finding it out. Here was a
man to whom she had devoted her life and for whom she had given it
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