| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Main Street by Sinclair Lewis: wall bunk with amazingly neat bed, frying-pan and ash-
stippled coffee-pot on the shelf behind the pot-bellied cannon-
ball stove, backwoods chairs--one constructed from half a
barrel, one from a tilted plank-and a row of books incredibly
assorted; Byron and Tennyson and Stevenson, a manual of
gas-engines, a book by Thorstein Veblen, and a spotty treatise
on "The Care, Feeding, Diseases, and Breeding of Poultry
and Cattle."
There was but one picture--a magazine color-plate of a
steep-roofed village in the Harz Mountains which suggested
kobolds and maidens with golden hair.
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Memorabilia by Xenophon: Soc. And would it not seem to be a base thing for a man to be affected
like the silliest bird or beast? as when the adulterer invades the
innermost sanctum[7] of the house, though he is well aware of the
risks which his crime involves,[8] the formidable penalties of the
law, the danger of being caught in the toils, and then suffering the
direst contumely. Considering all the hideous penalties which hang
over the adulterer's head, considering also the many means at hand to
release him from the thraldom of his passion, that a man should so
drive headlong on to the quicksands of perdition[9]--what are we to
say of such frenzy? The wretch who can so behave must surely be
tormented by an evil spirit?[10]
The Memorabilia |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Westward Ho! by Charles Kingsley: surplice, and what was more, the altar with a splendid flagon and
salver of plate (lost, I suppose, in the civil wars) which had been
taken in the great galleon. Ayacanora could understand that: but
the almsgiving she could not, till Mrs. Leigh told her, in her
simple way, that whosoever gave to the poor, gave to the Great
Spirit; for the Great Spirit was in them, and in Ayacanora too, if
she would be quiet and listen to him, instead of pouting, and
stamping, and doing nothing but what she liked. And the poor child
took in that new thought like a child, and worked her fingers to
the bone for all the old dames in Northam, and went about with Mrs.
Leigh, lovely and beloved, and looked now and then out from under
|
