| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Tales of the Klondyke by Jack London: he had hitherto failed to brush aside. His gold-scales were quite
small; in fact, their maximum was a pound and a half,--eighteen
ounces,--while his hoard mounted up to something like three and a
third times that. He had never been able to weigh it all at one
operation, and hence considered himself to have been shut out from
a new and most edifying coign of contemplation. Being denied
this, half the pleasure of possession had been lost; nay, he felt
that this miserable obstacle actually minimized the fact, as it
did the strength, of possession. It was the solution of this
problem flashing across his mind that had just brought him to his
feet. He searched the trail carefully in either direction. There
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from All's Well That Ends Well by William Shakespeare: [Enter PAROLLES.]
PAROLLES.
Ten o'clock. Within these three hours 'twill be time enough to go
home. What shall I say I have done? It must be a very plausive
invention that carries it ;they begin to smoke me: and disgraces
have of late knocked too often at my door. I find my tongue is
too foolhardy; but my heart hath the fear of Mars before it, and
of his creatures, not daring the reports of my tongue.
FIRST LORD. {Aside.]
This is the first truth that e'er thine own tongue was guilty of.
PAROLLES.
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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: more continuing than the rest. History, recording the causes of the
rise and fall of all things here below, could enlighten man as to the
moment when he might arrest the play of all his faculties; but neither
the conquerors, nor the actors, nor the women, nor the writers in the
great drama will listen to the salutary voice.
Cesar Birotteau, who might with reason think himself at the apogee of
his fortunes, used this crucial pause as the point of a new departure.
He did not know, moreover neither nations nor kings have attempted to
make known in characters ineffaceable, the cause of the vast
overthrows with which history teems, and of which so many royal and
commercial houses offer signal examples. Why are there no modern
Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau |
