| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce: sun, the brooding mists under the banks at some distance down
the stream, the fort, the soldiers, the piece of drift -- all
had distracted him. And now he became conscious of a new
disturbance. Striking through the thought of his dear
ones was sound which he could neither ignore nor understand,
a sharp, distinct, metallic percussion like the stroke of a
blacksmith's hammer upon the anvil; it had the same ringing
quality. He wondered what it was, and whether immeasurably
distant or near by -- it seemed both. Its recurrence was
regular, but as slow as the tolling of a death knell. He
awaited each new stroke with impatience and -- he knew not
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Pivot of Civilization by Margaret Sanger: corrections,'' tramp shelters, lying-in hospitals, and relief afforded
by privately endowed religious and social agencies, is shown in any
number of reports and studies of family histories. We find cases of
feeble-mindedness and mental defect in the reports on infant mortality
referred to in a previous chapter, as well as in other reports
published by the United States government. Here is a typical case
showing the astonishing ability to ``increase and multiply,''
organically bound up with delinquency and defect of various types:
``The parents of a feeble-minded girl, twenty years of age, who was
committed to the Kansas State Industrial Farm on a vagrancy charge,
lived in a thickly populated Negro district which was reported by the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Paz by Honore de Balzac: walls. Steinbock and Francois Souchet had designed the mantel-pieces
and the panels above the doors; Schinner had painted the ceilings in
his masterly manner. The beauties of the staircase, white as a woman's
arm, defied those of the hotel Rothschild. On account of the riots and
the unsettled times, the cost of this folly was only about eleven
hundred thousand francs,--to an Englishman a mere nothing. All this
luxury, called princely by persons who do not know what real princes
are, was built in the garden of the house of a purveyor made a Croesus
by the Revolution, who had escaped to Brussels and died there after
going into bankruptcy. The Englishman died in Paris, of Paris; for to
many persons Paris is a disease,--sometimes several diseases. His
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