| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Straight Deal by Owen Wister: all complexes, this anti-English complex is fed and watered by what we
learn of the War of 1812, by what we learn of the Civil War of 1861, and
by many lesser events in our history thus far. And just as a Republican
will admit nothing good of a Democrat and a Democrat nothing good of a
Republican because of the political complex, so does the great--the
vast--majority of Americans automatically and easily remember everything
against England and forget everything in her favor. Just try it any day
you like. Ask any average American you are sitting next to in a train what
he knows about England; and if he does remember anything and can tell it
to you, it will be unfavorable nine times in ten. The mere word "England"
starts his complex off, and out comes every fact it has seized that
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Schoolmistress and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov: tried either the death penalty or imprisonment for life, but if
one may judge _a priori_, the death penalty is more moral and
more humane than imprisonment for life. Capital punishment kills
a man at once, but lifelong imprisonment kills him slowly. Which
executioner is the more humane, he who kills you in a few minutes
or he who drags the life out of you in the course of many years?"
"Both are equally immoral," observed one of the guests, "for they
both have the same object -- to take away life. The State is not
God. It has not the right to take away what it cannot restore
when it wants to."
Among the guests was a young lawyer, a young man of
The Schoolmistress and Other Stories |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Mansion by Henry van Dyke: gradually out of
many minor paths; little footways coming across the meadows,
winding tracks following along beside the streams, faintly marked
trails
emerging from the woodlands. But on the hillside the threads
were more
firmly woven into one clear band of travel, though there were
still
a few dim paths joining it here and there, as if persons had been
climbing up the hill by other ways and had turned at last to seek
the road.
|
