The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: how many cattle he was feeding, what his liabilities were.
Her interest in these people was more than a business interest.
She carried them all in her mind as if they were characters
in a book or a play.
When Frances drove out into the country on business,
she would go miles out of her way to call on some of the
old people, or to see the women who seldom got to town.
She was quick at understanding the grandmothers who spoke
no English, and the most reticent and distrustful of them would
tell her their story without realizing they were doing so.
She went to country funerals and weddings in all weathers.
My Antonia |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin: in the great rivers. In like manner, the rise and fall
of the tide probably answer to the periodical inundations;
and thus the same effects are produced under apparently different
but really similar circumstances. The origin, however, of
these coatings of metallic oxides, which seem as if
cemented to the rocks, is not understood; and no reason, I
believe, can be assigned for their thickness remaining the
same.
One day I was amused by watching the habits of the
Diodon antennatus, which was caught swimming near the
shore. This fish, with its flabby skin, is well known to possess
The Voyage of the Beagle |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: variance with his, and to find the presentation of the real Christ
we must go to mediaeval art. There he is one maimed and marred;
one who is not comely to look on, because Beauty is a joy; one who
is not in fair raiment, because that may be a joy also: he is a
beggar who has a marvellous soul; he is a leper whose soul is
divine; he needs neither property nor health; he is a God realising
his perfection through pain.
The evolution of man is slow. The injustice of men is great. It
was necessary that pain should be put forward as a mode of self-
realisation. Even now, in some places in the world, the message of
Christ is necessary. No one who lived in modern Russia could
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