| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: almost unprecedented in the way of getting used to danger. Living
with it so long and so closely you've lost your sense of it; you
know it's there, but you're indifferent, and you cease even, as of
old, to have to whistle in the dark. Considering what the danger
is," May Bartram wound up, "I'm bound to say I don't think your
attitude could well be surpassed."
John Marcher faintly smiled. "It's heroic?"
"Certainly--call it that."
It was what he would have liked indeed to call it. "I AM then a
man of courage?"
"That's what you were to show me."
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: tell of the old grave-digger of Monkton, to whose unsuffering
bedside the minister was summoned. He dwelt in a cottage built
into the wall of the church-yard; and through a bull's-eye pane
above his bed he could see, as he lay dying, the rank grasses and
the upright and recumbent stones. Dr. Laurie was, I think, a
Moderate: 'tis certain, at least, that he took a very Roman view of
deathbed dispositions; for he told the old man that he had lived
beyond man's natural years, that his life had been easy and
reputable, that his family had all grown up and been a credit to
his care, and that it now behoved him unregretfully to gird his
loins and follow the majority. The grave-digger heard him out;
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Exiles by Honore de Balzac: of Tyre, Carthage, and Babylon; he called upon Babel and Jerusalem to
appear; and sought, without finding them, the transient furrows made
by the ploughshare of civilization. Humanity floated on the surface of
the earth as a ship whose wake is lost in the calm level of ocean.
These were the fundamental notions set forth in Doctor Sigier's
address, all wrapped in the mystical language and strange school Latin
of the time. He had made a special study of the Scriptures, and they
supplied him with the weapons with which he came before his
contemporaries to hasten their progress. He hid his boldness under his
immense learning, as with a cloak, and his philosophical bent under a
saintly life. At this moment, after bringing his hearers face to face
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