| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: "Who would not like to write something which all can read,
like ROBINSON CRUSOE? and who does not see with regret that
his page is not solid with a right materialistic treatment
which delights everybody?" I must say in passing that it is
not the right materialistic treatment which delights the
world in ROBINSON, but the romantic and philosophic interest
of the fable. The same treatment does quite the reverse of
delighting us when it is applied, in COLONEL JACK, to the
management of a plantation. But I cannot help suspecting
Thoreau to have been influenced either by this identical
remark or by some other closely similar in meaning. He began
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Man in Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart: went to sleep, it was to a soothing breeze that wafted in salt air
and a faint aroma of good tobacco. I was thoroughly tired, but I
slept restlessly, dreaming of two detectives with Pittsburg warrants
being held up by Hotchkiss at the point of a splint, while Alison
fastened their hands with a chain that was broken and much too short.
I was roused about dawn by a light rap at the door, and, opening it,
I found Forbes, in a pair of trousers and a pajama coat. He was as
pleasant as most fleshy people are when they have to get up at night,
and he said the telephone had been ringing for an hour, and he
didn't know why somebody else in the blankety-blank house couldn't
have heard it. He wouldn't get to sleep until noon.
The Man in Lower Ten |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: surpasses ours considering the bare barbaric basis upon which it
rests. For it is as true of the Japanese as of the proverbial Russian,
though in a more scientific sense, that if you scratch him you will
find the ancestral Tartar. But it is no less true that the descendants
of this rude forefather have now taken on a polish of which their
own exquisite lacquer gives but a faint reflection. The surface was
perfected after the substance was formed. Our word finish, with its
double meaning, expresses both the process and the result.
There entered, to heighten the bizarre effect, a spirit common in
minds that lack originality--the spirit of imitation. Though
consequent enough upon a want of initiative, the results of this trait
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