| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: to a dogma, which he must afterwards discover to be inexact;
they do not teach him a lesson, which he must afterwards
unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the
lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they
constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us
the web of experience, not as we can see it for ourselves,
but with a singular change - that monstrous, consuming EGO of
ours being, for the nonce, struck out. To be so, they must
be reasonably true to the human comedy; and any work that is
so serves the turn of instruction. But the course of our
education is answered best by those poems and romances where
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson: upon his vice, he is once out of five hundred times affected by
the dangers that he runs through his brutish, physical
insensibility; neither had I, long as I had considered my
position, made enough allowance for the complete moral
insensibility and insensate readiness to evil, which were the
leading characters of Edward Hyde. Yet it was by these that I was
punished. My devil had been long caged, he came out roaring. I
was conscious, even when I took the draught, of a more unbridled,
a more furious propensity to ill. It must have been this, I
suppose, that stirred in my soul that tempest of impatience with
which I listened to the civilities of my unhappy victim; I
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum: one of those great whirlwinds arose, mighty enough to crush any
building in its path. It was reached by a trap door in the middle
of the floor, from which a ladder led down into the small, dark hole.
When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could
see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree
nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached to
the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the
plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it.
Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of
the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen
everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun
The Wizard of Oz |
