| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Edition of The Ambassadors by Henry James: she smiled, "one has to accept one's conditions. Our young man's people
had seen her; one of his sisters, a charming woman--we know all
about them--had observed her somewhere with me. She had spoken
to her brother--turned him on; and we were again observed, poor Jeanne
and I, without our in the least knowing it. It was at the beginning
of the winter; it went on for some time; it outlasted our absence; it
began again on our return; and it luckily seems all right. The
young man had met Chad, and he got a friend to approach him--as
having a decent interest in us. Mr. Newsome looked well before he
leaped; he kept beautifully quiet and satisfied himself fully; then
only he spoke. It's what has for some time past occupied us. It
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: the fields near his father's house, and the blossoming of the
flowers in the spring, which I would not exchange for the whole of
his dissertation On the Freedom of the Will. And the very best
thing of Charles Darwin's that I know is a bit from a letter to his
wife: "At last I fell asleep," says he, "on the grass, and awoke
with a chorus of birds singing around me, and squirrels running up
the tree, and some woodpeckers laughing; and it was as pleasant and
rural a scene as ever I saw; and I did not care one penny how any
of the birds or beasts had been formed."
Little rivers have small responsibilities. They are not expected
to bear huge navies on their breast or supply a hundred-thousand
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Heritage of the Desert by Zane Grey: dreamy hollow hum, a somnolent song, murmured through the cottonwoods;
when no wind stirred, silence reigned, a silence not of serene plain or
mountain fastness, but shut in, compressed, strange, and breathless.
Safe from the storms of the elements as well as of the world was this
Garden of Eschtah.
Naab had put Hare to bed on the unroofed porch of a log house, but routed
him out early, and when Hare lifted the blankets a shower of
cotton-blossoms drifted away like snow. A grove of gray-barked trees
spread green canopy overhead, and through the intricate web shone crimson
walls, soaring with resistless onsweep up and up to shut out all but a
blue lake of sky.
The Heritage of the Desert |
