| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Tono Bungay by H. G. Wells: All the facts and forms of life remain darkling and cold. It was
an upland of melancholy questionings, a region from which I saw
all the world at new angles and in new aspects; I had outflanked
passion and romance.
I had come into a condition of vast perplexities. For the first
time in my life, at least so it seems to me now in this
retrospect, I looked at my existence as a whole.
Since this was nothing, what was I doing? What was I for?
I was going to and fro about Tono-Bungay--the business I had
taken up to secure Marion and which held me now in spite of our
intimate separation--and snatching odd week-ends and nights for
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving: of a farmhouse, and the addition of a supernumerary dish of cakes
or sweetmeats, or, peradventure, the parade of a silver teapot.
Our man of letters, therefore, was peculiarly happy in the smiles
of all the country damsels. How he would figure among them in the
churchyard, between services on Sundays; gathering grapes for
them from the wild vines that overran the surrounding trees;
reciting for their amusement all the epitaphs on the tombstones;
or sauntering, with a whole bevy of them, along the banks of the
adjacent mill-pond; while the more bashful country bumpkins hung
sheepishly back, envying his superior elegance and address.
From his half-itinerant life, also, he was a kind of
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Walking by Henry David Thoreau: the Ohio and the Missouri and heard the legends of Dubuque and of
Wenona's Cliff--still thinking more of the future than of the
past or present--I saw that this was a Rhine stream of a
different kind; that the foundations of castles were yet to be
laid, and the famous bridges were yet to be thrown over the
river; and I felt that THIS WAS THE HEROIC AGE ITSELF, though we
know it not, for the hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest
of men.
The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and
what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the
preservation of the World. Every tree sends its fibers forth in
Walking |
