| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Mansion by Henry van Dyke: There is something wrong--some other John Weightman--a confusion
of names--the book must be mistaken."
"There is no mistake," said the Keeper of the Gate, very calmly;
"here is your name, the record of your title and your possessions
in this place."
"But how could such a house be prepared for me," cried the man,
with a resentful tremor in his voice--"for me, after my
long and faithful service? Is this a suitable mansion for
one so well known and devoted? Why is it so pitifully small and
mean?
Why have you not built it large and fair, like the others?"
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: and tear him down out of the pulpit which he defiled? Not so,
indeed! They heard it all, and did but reverence him the more.
They little guessed what deadly purport lurked in those
self-condemning words. "The godly youth!" said they among
themselves. "The saint on earth! Alas! if he discern such
sinfulness in his own white soul, what horrid spectacle would he
behold in thine or mine!" The minister well knew -- subtle, but
remorseful hypocrite that he was! -- the light in which his
vague confession would be viewed. He had striven to put a cheat
upon himself by making the avowal of a guilty conscience, but had
gained only one other sin, and a self-acknowledged shame, without
The Scarlet Letter |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: nobody could know--how impossible that danger seemed to me.
VII
Can the transports of first love be calmed, checked, turned to a
cold suspicion of the future by a grave quotation from a work on
political economy? I ask--is it conceivable? Is it possible?
Would it be right? With my feet on the very shores of the sea
and about to embrace my blue-eyed dream, what could a
good-natured warning as to spoiling one's life mean to my
youthful passion? It was the most unexpected and the last, too,
of the many warnings I had received. It sounded to me very
bizarre--and, uttered as it was in the very presence of my
A Personal Record |
