| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton: take--become unthinkable, simply unthinkable. If
Madame Olenska's relations understood what these things
were, their opposition to her returning would no doubt
be as unconditional as her own; but they seem to
regard her husband's wish to have her back as proof of
an irresistible longing for domestic life." M. Riviere
paused, and then added: "Whereas it's far from being
as simple as that."
Archer looked back to the President of the United
States, and then down at his desk and at the papers
scattered on it. For a second or two he could not trust
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Walking by Henry David Thoreau: a fiction of the present--the poets of the world will be inspired
by American mythology.
The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true,
though they may not recommend themselves to the sense which is
most common among Englishmen and Americans today. It is not every
truth that recommends itself to the common sense. Nature has a
place for the wild Clematis as well as for the cabbage. Some
expressions of truth are reminiscent--others merely SENSIBLE, as
the phrase is,--others prophetic. Some forms of disease, even,
may prophesy forms of health. The geologist has discovered that
the figures of serpents, griffins, flying dragons, and other
Walking |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Poems of Goethe, Bowring, Tr. by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Thus he spoke, and the friends forthwith went on to the village,
Where, in gardens and barns and houses, the multitude crowded;
All along the broad road the numberless carts were collected,
Men were feeding the lowing cattle and feeding the horses.
Women on every hedge the linen were carefully drying,
Whilst the children in glee were splashing about in the streamlet.
Forcing their way through the waggons, and past the men and the cattle,
Walk'd the ambassador spies, looking well to the righthand and lefthand,
Hoping somewhere to see the form of the well-described maiden;
But wherever they look'd, no trace of the girl they discover'd.
Presently denser became the crowd. Round some of the waggons.
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