| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Iron Puddler by James J. Davis: the Elwood police court. I know what the word "previous" means. I
can give an account of myself. So, in the following pages I will
tell "where I was before I came here."
If my style seems rather flippant, it is because I have been
trained as an extemporaneous speaker and not as a writer. For
fifteen years I traveled over the country lecturing on the
Mooseheart School. My task was to interest men in the abstract
problems of child education. A speaker must entertain his hearers
to the end or lose their attention. And so I taxed my wit to make
this subject simple and easy to listen to. At last I evolved a
style of address that brought my points home to the men I was
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Myths and Myth-Makers by John Fiske: Oidipous is united to the Dawn, the mother who had borne him
at daybreak; and here the original story doubtless ended. In
the Vedic hymns we find Indra, the Sun, born of Dahana
(Daphne), the Dawn, whom he afterwards, in the evening
twilight, marries. To the Indian mind the story was here
complete; but the Greeks had forgotten and outgrown the
primitive signification of the myth. To them Oidipous and
Iokaste were human, or at least anthropomorphic beings; and a
marriage between them was a fearful crime which called for
bitter expiation. Thus the latter part of the story arose in
the effort to satisfy a moral feeling As the name of Laios
Myths and Myth-Makers |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: for a crowd of witnesses or indeed for any witness but John
Marcher, then by clear right of the register that he could scan
like an open page. The open page was the tomb of his friend, and
there were the facts of the past, there the truth of his life,
there the backward reaches in which he could lose himself. He did
this from time to time with such effect that he seemed to wander
through the old years with his hand in the arm of a companion who
was, in the most extraordinary manner, his other, his younger self;
and to wander, which was more extraordinary yet, round and round a
third presence--not wandering she, but stationary, still, whose
eyes, turning with his revolution, never ceased to follow him, and
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