| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Troll Garden and Selected Stories by Willa Cather: "It's big enough for us," snapped the agent, as he banged the
trunk into a corner.
That remark, apparently, was what Nils Ericson had wanted. He
chuckled quietly as he took a leather strap from his pocket and
swung his valise around his shoulder. Then he settled his Panama
securely on his head, turned up his trousers, tucked the flute case
under his arm, and started off across the fields. He gave the
town, as he would have said, a wide berth, and cut through a great
fenced pasture, emerging, when he rolled under the barbed wire at
the farther corner, upon a white dusty road which ran straight up
from the river valley to the high prairies, where the ripe wheat
The Troll Garden and Selected Stories |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton: "My book's hung up," he said impatiently, annoyed with Miss
Hicks's lack of tact. There was a girl who never put out
feelers ....
"Yes; I thought it was," she went on quietly, and he gave her a
startled glance. What the devil else did she think, he
wondered? He had never supposed her capable of getting far
enough out of her own thick carapace of self-sufficiency to
penetrate into any one else's feelings.
"The truth is," he continued, embarrassed, "I suppose I dug away
at it rather too continuously; that's probably why I felt the
need of a change. You see I'm only a beginner."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: different point of view, and to belong to the same sphere with them. But
we are not justified, therefore, in attempting to identify them, any more
than in wholly opposing them. The great oppositions of the sensible and
intellectual, the unchangeable and the transient, in whatever form of words
expressed, are always maintained in Plato. But the lesser logical
distinctions, as we should call them, whether of ontology or predication,
which troubled the pre-Socratic philosophy and came to the front in
Aristotle, are variously discussed and explained. Thus far we admit
inconsistency in Plato, but no further. He lived in an age before logic
and system had wholly permeated language, and therefore we must not always
expect to find in him systematic arrangement or logical precision:--'poema
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