| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Tales and Fantasies by Robert Louis Stevenson: desperate indifference, which his father set down to levity;
but which sprung from the consciousness of worse behind.
'Your mother's watch, too?' asked Mr. Nicholson.
'Oh, the watch is all right!' cried John. 'At least, I mean
I was coming to the watch - the fact is, I am ashamed to say,
I - I had pawned the watch before. Here is the ticket; they
didn't find that; the watch can be redeemed; they don't sell
pledges.' The lad panted out these phrases, one after
another, like minute guns; but at the last word, which rang
in that stately chamber like an oath, his heart failed him
utterly; and the dreaded silence settled on father and son.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing and
emasculate. Life imposes by brute energy, like inarticulate
thunder; art catches the ear, among the far louder noises of
experience, like an air artificially made by a discreet musician.
A proposition of geometry does not compete with life; and a
proposition of geometry is a fair and luminous parallel for a work
of art. Both are reasonable, both untrue to the crude fact; both
inhere in nature, neither represents it. The novel, which is a
work of art, exists, not by its resemblances to life, which are
forced and material, as a shoe must still consist of leather, but
by its immeasurable difference from life, which is designed and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Profits of Religion by Upton Sinclair: God upon their eating.
The Bishop comes; and I take up the "Times"--the labor-hating,
labor-baiting, fire-and-slaughter-breathing "Times"--and here is
the episcopal picture on the front page, the arms stretched four
columns wide in oratorical beneficence. How the shepherd of Jesus
does love the Merchants and Manufacturers! How his eloquence is
poured out upon them! "You represent, gentlemen, the largest and
the most civilizing secular body in the country. You are the
pioneers of American civilization..... I am glad to be among you;
glad that my lines have fallen in this glorious land by the
sunset sea, and honored to meet in intimate acquaintance the big
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