| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Mountains by Stewart Edward White: Trail and went into camp just below us. Towards
evening he sauntered in.
I sincerely wish I could sketch this man for you
just as he came down through the fire-lit trees. He
was about six feet tall, very leanly built, with a
weather-beaten face of mahogany on which was
superimposed a sweeping mustache and beetling eye-
brows. These had originally been brown, but the
sun had bleached them almost white in remarkable
contrast to his complexion. Eyes keen as sunlight
twinkled far down beneath the shadows of the brows
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Mosses From An Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne: of the former. They looked for the root of this trouble in his
shattered schemes of domestic bliss,--wilfully shattered by
himself,--but could not be satisfied of its existence there. Some
thought that their once brilliant friend was in an incipient
stage of insanity, of which his passionate impulses had perhaps
been the forerunners; others prognosticated a general blight and
gradual decline. From Roderick's own lips they could learn
nothing. More than once, it is true, he had been heard to say,
clutching his hands convulsively upon his breast,--"It gnaws me!
It gnaws me!"--but, by different auditors, a great diversity of
explanation was assigned to this ominous expression. What could
Mosses From An Old Manse |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle.
The beautiful youth, Charmides, who is also the most temperate of human
beings, is asked by Socrates, 'What is Temperance?' He answers
characteristically, (1) 'Quietness.' 'But Temperance is a fine and noble
thing; and quietness in many or most cases is not so fine a thing as
quickness.' He tries again and says (2) that temperance is modesty. But
this again is set aside by a sophistical application of Homer: for
temperance is good as well as noble, and Homer has declared that 'modesty
is not good for a needy man.' (3) Once more Charmides makes the attempt.
This time he gives a definition which he has heard, and of which Socrates
conjectures that Critias must be the author: 'Temperance is doing one's
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