| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Call of the Canyon by Zane Grey: and suddenly to leap into a thin white sheet.
Out from the porch the view was restricted to glimpses between the pines,
and beyond to the opposite wall of the canyon. How shut-in, how walled in
this home!
"In summer it might be good to spend a couple of weeks here," soliloquized
Carley. "But to live here? Heavens! A person might as well be buried."
Heavy footsteps upon the porch below accompanied by a man's voice quickened
Carley's pulse. Did they belong to Glenn? After a strained second she
decided not. Nevertheless, the acceleration of her blood and an unwonted
glow of excitement, long a stranger to her, persisted as she left the porch
and entered the boarded hall. How gray and barn-like this upper part of the
The Call of the Canyon |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: primal truth.
Such a definition as this would in a way be defensible. Religion,
whatever it is, is a man's total reaction upon life, so why not
say that any total reaction upon life is a religion? Total
reactions are different from casual reactions, and total
attitudes are different from usual or professional attitudes. To
get at them you must go behind the foreground of existence and
reach down to that curious sense of the whole residual cosmos as
an everlasting presence, intimate or alien, terrible or amusing,
lovable or odious, which in some degree everyone possesses. This
sense of the world's presence, appealing as it does to our
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy: eventually brought her to the highway. Once here, she ran along
with great speed, animated by a devoted purpose which had much
about it that was stoical; and it was with scarcely any faltering
of spirit that, after an hour's progress, she passed over Rubdown
Hill, and onward towards that same Hintock, and that same house,
out of which she had fled a few days before in irresistible alarm.
But that had happened which, above all other things of chance and
change, could make her deliberately frustrate her plan of flight
and sink all regard of personal consequences.
One speciality of Fitzpiers's was respected by Grace as much as
ever--his professional skill. In this she was right. Had his
The Woodlanders |
