| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from House of Mirth by Edith Wharton: which the protagonists walk through the passions without
displacing a drapery. The ladies stood in unrelated attitudes
calculated to isolate their effects, and the men hung about them
as irrelevantly as stage heroes whose tailors are named in the
programme. It was Selden himself who unwittingly fused the group
by arresting the attention of one of its members.
"Why, Mr. Selden!" Mrs. Fisher exclaimed in surprise; and with a
gesture toward Mrs. Jack Stepney and Mrs. Wellington Bry, she
added plaintively: "We're starving to death because we can't
decide where to lunch."
Welcomed into their group, and made the confidant of their
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Second Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln: It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's
assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces;
but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both
could not be answered--that of neither has been answered fully.
The Almighty has his own purposes. "Woe unto the world because
of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe
to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose
that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the
providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued
through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he
gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due
Second Inaugural Address |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Study of a Woman by Honore de Balzac: that she was waiting in vain. A brilliant man--Stendhal--has given the
fantastic name of "crystallization" to the process which Madame de
Listomere's thoughts went through before, during, and after this
evening.
Four days later Eugene was scolding his valet.
"Ah ca! Joseph; I shall soon have to send you away, my lad."
"What is it, monsieur?"
"You do nothing but make mistakes. Where did you carry those letters I
gave you Saturday?"
Joseph became stolid. Like a statue in some cathedral porch, he stood
motionless, entirely absorbed in the labors of imagination. Suddenly
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