| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Anabasis by Xenophon: Xenophon the Athenian was born 431 B.C. He was a
pupil of Socrates. He marched with the Spartans,
and was exiled from Athens. Sparta gave him land
and property in Scillus, where he lived for many
years before having to move once more, to settle
in Corinth. He died in 354 B.C.
The Anabasis is his story of the march to Persia
to aid Cyrus, who enlisted Greek help to try and
take the throne from Artaxerxes, and the ensuing
return of the Greeks, in which Xenophon played a
leading role. This occurred between 401 B.C. and
Anabasis |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Old Indian Legends by Zitkala-Sa: country whither he was bound for a long hunt. Suddenly he came
upon the edge of a wide brook. His alert eye caught sight of a
rawhide rope staked to the water's brink, which led away toward a
small round hut in the distance. The ground was trodden into a
deep groove beneath the loosely drawn rawhide rope.
"Hun-he!" exclaimed Manstin, bending over the freshly made
footprints in the moist bank of the brook. "A man's footprints!"
he said to himself. "A blind man lives in yonder hut! This rope
is his guide by which he comes for his daily water!" surmised
Manstin, who knew all the peculiar contrivances of the people. At
once his eyes became fixed upon the solitary dwelling and hither he
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lady Baltimore by Owen Wister: known well enough that if the old ladies found any blemish on that
occasion, it was my being there! To them I must remain forever a
"Yankee," a wall perfectly imaginary and perfectly real between us; and
the fact that young John could take any other view of me, was to them a
sign of that "radical" tendency in him which they were able to forgive
solely because he was of the younger generation and didn't know any
better.
And with these thoughts in my mind, and remembering a certain very grave
talk I had once held with Eliza in the Exchange about the North and the
South, in which it was my good fortune to make her see that there is on
our soil nowadays such a being as an American, who feels, wherever he
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