| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain: conspicuously conscious of their bare arms, their grand-
mothers' ancient trinkets, their bits of pink and blue
ribbon and the flowers in their hair. All the rest of
the house was filled with non-participating scholars.
The exercises began. A very little boy stood up and
sheepishly recited, "You'd scarce expect one of my
age to speak in public on the stage," etc. -- accompany-
ing himself with the painfully exact and spasmodic
gestures which a machine might have used -- supposing
the machine to be a trifle out of order. But he got
through safely, though cruelly scared, and got a fine
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Selected Writings of Guy De Maupassant by Guy De Maupassant: out in the short story called "Solitude," in which he describes
the insurmountable barrier which exists between man and man, or
man and woman, however intimate the friendship between them. He
could picture but one way of destroying this terrible loneliness,
the attainment of a spiritual--a divine--state of love, a
condition to which he would give no name utterable by human lips,
lest it be profaned, but for which his whole being yearned. How
acutely he felt his failure to attain his deliverance may be
drawn from his wail that mankind has no UNIVERSAL measure of
happiness.
"Each one of us," writes De Maupassant, "forms for himself an
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Moon-Face and Other Stories by Jack London: wherefore his tearful wife and daughters shook their heads, and wherefore he
but waxed the more violent, and the gardener and the coachman tightened the
straps by another hole.
Nor, while Paul Tichlorne was thus successfully mastering the problem of
invisibility, was Lloyd Inwood a whit behind. I went over in answer to a
message of his to come and see how he was getting on. Now his laboratory
occupied an isolated situation in the midst of his vast grounds. It was built
in a pleasant little glade, surrounded on all sides by a dense forest growth,
and was to be gained by way of a winding and erratic path. But I have
travelled that path so often as to know every foot of it, and conceive my
surprise when I came upon the glade and found no laboratory. The quaint shed
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