| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle
shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body
capable of enormous leverage--a cruel body.
His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of
fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in
it, even toward people he liked--and there were men at New Haven who had
hated his guts.
"Now, don't think my opinion on these matters is final," he seemed to
say, "just because I'm stronger and more of a man than you are." We
were in the same senior society, and while we were never intimate I
always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like
The Great Gatsby |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Wyoming by William MacLeod Raine: She was rising already, and as she paid for the ice cream that
innocent gaze smote him again with the brightest of Irish eyes
conceivable. It lingered for just a ponderable sunlit moment or
him. She had smiled once more.
After a decent interval Mac pursued his petit charmer to the
hotel. She was seated on the porch reading a magazine, and was
absorbedly unconscious of him when he passed. For a few awkward
moments he hung around the office, then returned to the porch and
took the chair most distant from her. He had sat there a long ten
minutes before she let her hands and the magazine fall into her
lap and demurely gave him his chance.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: reply that the time had not come for such a feat. Neither Wagner
nor anyone else then living knew enough to achieve it. Besides,
what he had already done had reached the omit of even his immense
energy and perseverance and so he did the best he could with the
unfinished and for ever unfinishable work, rounding it off with
an opera much as Rossini rounded off some of his religious
compositions with a galop. Only, Rossini on such occasions wrote
in his score "Excusez du pen," but Wagner left us to find out the
change for ourselves, perhaps to test how far we had really
followed his meaning.
WAGNER'S OWN EXPLANATION
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