| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Girl with the Golden Eyes by Honore de Balzac: every Tuesday? Happily, by Tuesday, this people is glutted, sleeps off
its pleasure, is penniless, and returns to its labor, to dry bread,
stimulated by a need of material procreation, which has become a habit
to it. None the less, this people has its phenomenal virtues, its
complete men, unknown Napoleons, who are the type of its strength
carried to its highest expression, and sum up its social capacity in
an existence wherein thought and movement combine less to bring joy
into it than to neutralize the action of sorrow.
Chance has made an artisan economical, chance has favored him with
forethought, he has been able to look forward, has met with a wife and
found himself a father, and, after some years of hard privation, he
The Girl with the Golden Eyes |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Lock and Key Library by Julian Hawthorne, Ed.: interposed themselves. As my story approached its climax, his
agitation grew almost equal to my own, and he listened to the
close, his teeth clenched, his brows bent, as if passing again with
me through that awful conflict. When I had finished, it was some
moments before either of us could speak; and then he burst forth
into bitter self-reproach for having so far yielded to his
brother's angry obstinacy as to allow me to sleep the third night
in that fatal room.
"It was cowardice," he said, "sheer cowardice! After all that has
happened, I dared not have a quarrel with one of my own blood. And
yet if I had not hardened my heart, I had reason to know what I was
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Options by O. Henry: "Well, they ain't so bad. I like 'em better than most foreigners that
have come over in the last few hundred years. One thing about the
Indian is this: when he mixes with the white race he swaps all his own
vices for them of the pale-faces--and he retains all his own virtues.
Well, his virtues are enough to call out the reserves whenever he lets
'em loose. But the imported foreigners adopt our virtues and keep
their own vices--and it's going to take our whole standing army some
day to police that gang.
"But let me tell you about the trip I took to Mexico with High jack
Snakefeeder, a Cherokee twice removed, a graduate of a Pennsylvania
college and the latest thing in pointed-toed, rubber-heeled, patent
Options |
