| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Alexander's Bridge by Willa Cather: that cut the air above as many rivers.
After dinner Alexander took Wilson up to
his study. It was a large room over the
library, and looked out upon the black river
and the row of white lights along the
Cambridge Embankment. The room was not at all
what one might expect of an engineer's study.
Wilson felt at once the harmony of beautiful
things that have lived long together without
obtrusions of ugliness or change. It was none
of Alexander's doing, of course; those warm
Alexander's Bridge |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: and the alluring analogies of law and order afforded by physical
science, were most important forces in encouraging the rise of the
spirit of scepticism, yet it was on its ethical side that the Greek
mythology was chiefly open to attack.
It is difficult to shake the popular belief in miracles, but no man
will admit sin and immorality as attributes of the Ideal he
worships; so the first symptoms of a new order of thought are shown
in the passionate outcries of Xenophanes and Heraclitos against the
evil things said by Homer of the sons of God; and in the story told
of Pythagoras, how that he saw tortured in Hell the 'two founders
of Greek theology,' we can recognise the rise of the Aufklarung as
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from An Inland Voyage by Robert Louis Stevenson: pipe in a flaw of fair weather. But the wind blew so hard, we
could get little else to smoke. There were no natural objects in
the neighbourhood, but some sordid workshops. A group of children
headed by a tall girl stood and watched us from a little distance
all the time we stayed. I heartily wonder what they thought of us.
At Hautmont, the lock was almost impassable; the landing-place
being steep and high, and the launch at a long distance. Near a
dozen grimy workmen lent us a hand. They refused any reward; and,
what is much better, refused it handsomely, without conveying any
sense of insult. 'It is a way we have in our countryside,' said
they. And a very becoming way it is. In Scotland, where also you
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