| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: struggling up for him at the end, that, whatever might have
happened or not happened, he would have come round of himself to
the light. The incident of an autumn day had put the match to the
train laid from of old by his misery. With the light before him he
knew that even of late his ache had only been smothered. It was
strangely drugged, but it throbbed; at the touch it began to bleed.
And the touch, in the event, was the face of a fellow-mortal. This
face, one grey afternoon when the leaves were thick in the alleys,
looked into Marcher's own, at the cemetery, with an expression like
the cut of a blade. He felt it, that is, so deep down that he
winced at the steady thrust. The person who so mutely assaulted
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Faraday as a Discoverer by John Tyndall: the respectable, truthful, and altogether trustworthy man whose
appearance here is so fresh in our memories. Anderson continued to
be the reverential helper of Faraday and the faithful servant of
this Institution for nearly forty years.[5]
In 1831 Faraday published a paper, 'On a peculiar class of Optical
Deceptions,' to which I believe the beautiful optical toy called the
Chromatrope owes its origin. In the same year he published a paper
on Vibrating Surfaces, in which he solved an acoustical problem
which, though of extreme simplicity when solved, appears to have
baffled many eminent men. The problem was to account for the fact
that light bodies, such as the seed of lycopodium, collected at the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Tramp Abroad by Mark Twain: the grand simplicity and dignity of a composition like
that effectively.
We took a tolerably early breakfast, and tramped off
toward Zermatt through the reeking lanes of the village,
glad to get away from that bell. By and by we had a fine
spectacle on our right. It was the wall-like butt end of a
huge glacier, which looked down on us from an Alpine height
which was well up in the blue sky. It was an astonishing
amount of ice to be compacted together in one mass.
We ciphered upon it and decided that it was not less than
several hundred feet from the base of the wall of solid
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