| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Death of the Lion by Henry James: has been quite exhausted. Have you exhausted it, my dear sir? Had
you exhausted it when you came down here? It seems to me in our
time almost wholly neglected, and something should surely be done
to restore its ruined credit. It's the course to which the artist
himself at every step, and with such pathetic confidence, refers
us. This last book of Mr. Paraday's is full of revelations."
"Revelations?" panted Mr. Morrow, whom I had forced again into his
chair.
"The only kind that count. It tells you with a perfection that
seems to me quite final all the author thinks, for instance, about
the advent of the 'larger latitude.'"
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell: girls, Scarlett found herself straining her ears for familiar
sounds--the shrill laughter of the pickaninnies in the quarters,
the creaking of wagons home from the fields, the thunder of
Gerald's stallion tearing across the pasture, the crunching of
carriage wheels on the drive and the gay voices of neighbors
dropping in for an afternoon of gossip. But she listened in vain.
The road lay still and deserted and never a cloud of red dust
proclaimed the approach of visitors. Tara was an island in a sea
of rolling green hills and red fields.
Somewhere was the world and families who ate and slept safely under
their own roofs. Somewhere girls in thrice-turned dresses were
Gone With the Wind |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: Such discourses, if we may form a judgment from the three which are extant
(for the so-called Funeral Oration of Demosthenes is a bad and spurious
imitation of Thucydides and Lysias), conformed to a regular type. They
began with Gods and ancestors, and the legendary history of Athens, to
which succeeded an almost equally fictitious account of later times. The
Persian war usually formed the centre of the narrative; in the age of
Isocrates and Demosthenes the Athenians were still living on the glories of
Marathon and Salamis. The Menexenus veils in panegyric the weak places of
Athenian history. The war of Athens and Boeotia is a war of liberation;
the Athenians gave back the Spartans taken at Sphacteria out of kindness--
indeed, the only fault of the city was too great kindness to their enemies,
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