| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Vendetta by Honore de Balzac: "Marry one another, my children," he said, with fatherly kindness.
They both dropped their eyes, and their silence was the first avowal
they had made to each other of their love.
"You will surely be happy," said Servin. "There is nothing in life to
equal the happiness of two beings like yourselves when bound together
in love."
Luigi pressed the hand of his protector without at first being able to
utter a word; but presently he said, in a voice of emotion:--
"To you I owe it all."
"Be happy! I bless and wed you," said the painter, with comic unction,
laying his hands upon the heads of the lovers.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Republic by Plato: Plato does not seriously intend to expel poets from life and society. But
he feels strongly the unreality of their writings; he is protesting against
the degeneracy of poetry in his own day as we might protest against the
want of serious purpose in modern fiction, against the unseemliness or
extravagance of some of our poets or novelists, against the time-serving of
preachers or public writers, against the regardlessness of truth which to
the eye of the philosopher seems to characterize the greater part of the
world. For we too have reason to complain that our poets and novelists
'paint inferior truth' and 'are concerned with the inferior part of the
soul'; that the readers of them become what they read and are injuriously
affected by them. And we look in vain for that healthy atmosphere of which
The Republic |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Cruise of the Jasper B. by Don Marquis: box, having a vague idea that perhaps after all it did not really
contain what they had said was in it. But I could not bear the
thought of its being opened. I refused to allow Elmer to look
into it.
"I determined that I would ship the box at once to some
fictitious personage, and then take the next ship back to
England.
"I hastily wrote a card, which I tacked on the box, consigning it
to Miss Genevieve Pringle, Newark, N. J. The name was the first
invention that came into my head. Newark I had heard of. I knew
vaguely that it was west of New York, but whether it was twenty
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