| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The American by Henry James: sit down and have a glass also, and tell him as an honest fellow
whether his church or his gallery was really worth a man's trouble.
At last he rose and stretched his long legs, beckoned to the man
of monuments, looked at his watch, and fixed his eye on his adversary.
"What is it?" he asked. "How far?" And whatever the answer was,
although he sometimes seemed to hesitate, he never declined.
He stepped into an open cab, made his conductor sit beside him
to answer questions, bade the driver go fast (he had a particular
aversion to slow driving) and rolled, in all probability
through a dusty suburb, to the goal of his pilgrimage.
If the goal was a disappointment, if the church was meagre, or the ruin
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from O Pioneers! by Willa Cather: to the Bergsons', Frank stopped. In the warm,
breathless night air he heard a murmuring
sound, perfectly inarticulate, as low as the
sound of water coming from a spring, where
there is no fall, and where there are no stones to
fret it. Frank strained his ears. It ceased. He
held his breath and began to tremble. Resting
the butt of his gun on the ground, he parted the
mulberry leaves softly with his fingers and
peered through the hedge at the dark figures on
the grass, in the shadow of the mulberry tree.
O Pioneers! |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Proposed Roads To Freedom by Bertrand Russell: always tends to increase up to the limit of subsistence,
that the production of food becomes more expensive
as its amount is increased, and that therefore, apart
from short exceptional periods when new discoveries
produce temporary alleviations, the bulk of mankind
must always be at the lowest level consistent with
survival and reproduction. As applied to the civilized
races of the world, this doctrine is becoming
untrue through the rapid decline in the birth-rate;
but, apart from this decline, there are many other
reasons why the doctrine cannot be accepted, at any
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