| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken: Suppose I tell you who I am, in fact. . . .
Deceiving you--as far as I may know it--
Only so much as I deceive myself.
If you are clever you already see me
As one who moves forever in a cloud
Of warm bright vanity: a luminous cloud
Which falls on all things with a quivering magic,
Changing such outlines as a light may change,
Brightening what lies dark to me, concealing
Those things that will not change . . . I walk sustained
In a world of things that flatter me: a sky
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela: "Now if they understand you, everything's all right;
they leave you alone and that's all there is to it; but some-
times they try to talk you down and hit you and--well,
you know how it is, a fellow's quick-tempered and he'll be
damned if he'll stand for someone ordering him around
and telling him what's what. So before you know it, you've
got your knife out or your gun leveled, and then off you
go for a wild run in the sierra, until they've forgotten the
corpse,see?
"All right: that's just about what happened to Mon-
ico. The fellow was a greater bluffer than the rest. He
The Underdogs |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Young Forester by Zane Grey: his share, and the lone bandit played his part in a way to make me shiver.
The great pines, the shady, brown trails, the sunlit glades, were as real
to me as if I had been among them. Most vivid of all was the lonely forest
at night and the campfire. I heard the sputter of the red embers and
smelled the wood smoke; I peered into the dark shadows watching and
listening for I knew not what.
On the next day early in the afternoon father appeared on the river road.
"There he is," cried Hal. "He's driving Billy. How he's coming"
Billy was father's fastest horse. It pleased me immensely to see the pace,
for father would not have been driving fast unless he were in a
particularly good humor. And when he stopped on the bank above camp I could
The Young Forester |
