| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Soul of Man by Oscar Wilde: kindness. For what are called criminals nowadays are not criminals
at all. Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime.
That indeed is the reason why our criminals are, as a class, so
absolutely uninteresting from any psychological point of view.
They are not marvellous Macbeths and terrible Vautrins. They are
merely what ordinary, respectable, commonplace people would be if
they had not got enough to eat. When private property is abolished
there will be no necessity for crime, no demand for it; it will
cease to exist. Of course, all crimes are not crimes against
property, though such are the crimes that the English law, valuing
what a man has more than what a man is, punishes with the harshest
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Margret Howth: A Story of To-day by Rebecca Harding Davis: anxious-faced men and women jostled and pushed, but she passed
through them with a different heart from yesterday's. Somehow,
the morbid fancies were gone: she was keenly alive; the coarse
real life of this huckster fired her, touched her blood with a
more vital stimulus than any tale of crusader. As she went down
the crooked maze of dingy lanes, she could hear Lois's little
cracked bell far off: it sounded like a Christmas song to her.
She half smiled, remembering how sometimes in her distempered
brain the world had seemed a gray, dismal Dance of Death. How
actual it was to-day,--hearty, vigorous, alive with honest work
and tears and pleasure! A broad, good world to live and work in,
Margret Howth: A Story of To-day |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Alexander's Bridge by Willa Cather: resolute offshoot of himself spoil his life for
him. This new force was not he, it was but a
part of him. He would not even admit that it
was stronger than he; but it was more active.
It was by its energy that this new feeling got
the better of him. His wife was the woman
who had made his life, gratified his pride,
given direction to his tastes and habits.
The life they led together seemed to him beautiful.
Winifred still was, as she had always been,
Romance for him, and whenever he was deeply
Alexander's Bridge |
