| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Main Street by Sinclair Lewis: She was supposed to be asleep; she was too exquisitely drowsy
to break the charm by speaking. On a slip of paper laid on
the bureau--she could hear the pencil grinding against the
marble slab--he wrote his destination. He went out, hungry,
chilly, unprotesting; and she, before she fell asleep again, loved
him for his sturdiness, and saw the drama of his riding by
night to the frightened household on the distant farm; pictured
children standing at a window, waiting for him. He suddenly
had in her eyes the heroism of a wireless operator on a ship
in a collision; of an explorer, fever-clawed, deserted by his
bearers, but going on--jungle--going----
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Salammbo by Gustave Flaubert: Some might be seen carrying an axe, a lance, a club, and two swords
all at once; others bristled with darts like porcupines, and their
arms stood out from their cuirasses in sheets of horn or iron plates.
At last the scaffoldings of the lofty engines appeared: carrobalistas,
onagers, catapults and scorpions, rocking on chariots drawn by mules
and quadrigas of oxen; and in proportion as the army drew out, the
captains ran panting right and left to deliver commands, close up the
files, and preserve the intervals. Such of the Ancients as held
commands had come in purple cassocks, the magnificent fringes of which
tangled in the white straps of their cothurni. Their faces, which were
smeared all over with vermilion, shone beneath enormous helmets
Salammbo |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: thoroughness the half measures, weaknesses and meannesses of their first
attempts; seem to throw down their adversary only in order to enable him
to draw fresh strength from the earth, and again, to rise up against
them in more gigantic stature; constantly recoil in fear before the
undefined monster magnitude of their own objects--until finally that
situation is created which renders all retreat impossible, and the
conditions themselves cry out:
"Hic Rhodus, hic salta !" [#2 Here is Rhodes, leap here! An allusion to
Aesop's Fables.]
Every observer of average intelligence; even if he failed to follow step
by step the course of French development, must have anticipated that an
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