| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Virginian by Owen Wister: The pines had altogether ceased; but their silence was as
tremendous as their roar had been.
"I don't know, though," he resumed. "There's times when the
plains can be awful big, too."
Presently we finished a hand, and he said, "Let me see that
paper."
He sat readin, it apparently through, while I arranged my
blankets to make a warm bed. Then, since the paper continued to
absorb him, I got myself ready, and slid between my blankets for
the night. "You'll need another candle soon in that lantern,"
said I.
The Virginian |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Parmenides by Plato: universal; and that every possible conception which we can form of Him is
limited by the human faculties. We cannot by any effort of thought or
exertion of faith be in and out of our own minds at the same instant. How
can we conceive Him under the forms of time and space, who is out of time
and space? How get rid of such forms and see Him as He is? How can we
imagine His relation to the world or to ourselves? Innumerable
contradictions follow from either of the two alternatives, that God is or
that He is not. Yet we are far from saying that we know nothing of Him,
because all that we know is subject to the conditions of human thought. To
the old belief in Him we return, but with corrections. He is a person, but
not like ourselves; a mind, but not a human mind; a cause, but not a
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson: long time Marie-Madeleine had observed him apart. His
sadness, the beauty of his smile when by any chance he
remembered her existence and addressed her, the changes of
his mind signalled forth by an abstruse play of feature, the
mere fact that he was foreign and a thing detached from the
local and the accustomed, insensibly attracted and affected
her. Kindness was ready in her mind; it but lacked the touch
of an occasion to effervesce and crystallise. Now Balmile
had come hitherto in a very poor plain habit; and this day of
the mistral, when his mantle was just open, and she saw
beneath it the glancing of the violet and the velvet and the
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