| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Crowd by Gustave le Bon: unanimity in this repetition--as has occurred in the case of
certain famous financial undertakings rich enough to purchase
every assistance-- what is called a current of opinion is formed
and the powerful mechanism of contagion intervenes. Ideas,
sentiments, emotions, and beliefs possess in crowds a contagious
power as intense as that of microbes. This phenomenon is very
natural, since it is observed even in animals when they are
together in number. Should a horse in a stable take to biting
his manger the other horses in the stable will imitate him. A
panic that has seized on a few sheep will soon extend to the
whole flock. In the case of men collected in a crowd all
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Emma McChesney & Co. by Edna Ferber: River of Silver. From the boat's upper deck, Emma McChesney
beheld a sky line which was so like the sky line of her own New
York that it gave her a shock. She was due for still another
shock when, an hour later, she found herself in a maelstrom of
motors, cabs, street cars, newsboys, skyscrapers, pedestrians,
policemen, subway stations. Where was the South American
languor? Where the Argentine inertia? The rush and roar of it,
the bustle and the bang of it made the twenty-three-day voyage
seem a myth.
"I'm going to shut my eyes," she told herself, "and then open
them quickly. If that little brown traffic-policeman turns out
Emma McChesney & Co. |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tom Grogan by F. Hopkinson Smith: the lads, but into the whole household as well. Mullins, in his
later years, had been a dependent about Trinity College, and
constant association with books and students had given him a taste
for knowledge denied his daughter. Tom had left home when a girl.
In the long winter nights during the slack season, after the
stalls were bedded and the horses were fed and watered and locked
up for the night, the old man would draw up his chair to the big
kerosene lamp on the table, and tell the boys stories--they
listening with wide-open eyes, Cully interrupting the narrative
every now and then by such asides as "No flies on them fellers,
wuz ther', Patsy? They wuz daisies, they wuz. Go on, Pop; it's
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