| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: He came from a town in Iowa where there were a great many Swedes,
and could speak a little Swedish, which gave him a great advantage
with the early Scandinavian settlers.
In every frontier settlement there are men who have come
there to escape restraint. Cutter was one of the `fast set'
of Black Hawk business men. He was an inveterate gambler,
though a poor loser. When we saw a light burning in his office
late at night, we knew that a game of poker was going on.
Cutter boasted that he never drank anything stronger than sherry,
and he said he got his start in life by saving the money
that other young men spent for cigars. He was full of moral
My Antonia |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Letters of Two Brides by Honore de Balzac: that yours is already started, and that, in a few days, I shall be at
home in your beautiful Gemenos valley, which I know only through your
descriptions, just as you will live that Paris life, revealed to you
hitherto only in our dreams.
Well, then, sweet child, know that on a certain morning--a red-letter
day in my life--there arrived from Paris a lady companion and
Philippe, the last remaining of my grandmother's valets, charged to
carry me off. When my aunt summoned me to her room and told me the
news, I could not speak for joy, and only gazed at her stupidly.
"My child," she said, in her guttural voice, "I can see that you leave
me without regret, but this farewell is not the last; we shall meet
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Crowd by Gustave le Bon: seems at least as much a consequence of their old age as of any
particular system. It constitutes one of the precursory symptoms
of that decadent phase which up to now no civilisation has
escaped.
Judging by the lessons of the past, and by the symptoms that
strike the attention on every side, several of our modern
civilisations have reached that phase of extreme old age which
precedes decadence. It seems inevitable that all peoples should
pass through identical phases of existence, since history is so
often seen to repeat its course.
It is easy to note briefly these common phases of the evolution
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