| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Father Sergius by Leo Tolstoy: it? Throw myself into the river? I can swim and should not
drown. Hang myself? Yes, just throw this sash over a branch.'
This seemed so feasible and so easy that he felt horrified. As
usual at moments of despair he felt the need of prayer. But
there was no one to pray to. There was no God. He lay down
resting on his arm, and suddenly such a longing for sleep
overcame him that he could no longer support his head on his
hand, but stretched out his arm, laid his head upon it, and fell
asleep. But that sleep lasted only for a moment. He woke up
immediately and began not to dream but to remember.
He saw himself as a child in his mother's home in the country. A
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Margret Howth: A Story of To-day by Rebecca Harding Davis: warmly with a "Why, Lo, my little girl!" Nobody else in the
world ever called her by a pet name.
Sometimes he was gloomy and silent, but generally he told her of
all that had happened in the mill, particularly any little word
of notice or praise he might have received, watching her
anxiously until she laughed at it, and then rubbing his hands
cheerfully. He need not have doubted Lois's faith in him.
Whatever the rest did, she believed in him; she always had
believed in him, through all the dark years, when he was at home,
and in the penitentiary. They were gone now, never to come back.
It had come right. If the others wronged him, and it hurt her
Margret Howth: A Story of To-day |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Amy Foster by Joseph Conrad: three dollars a day, and if you were clever you
could find places where true gold could be picked
up on the ground. His father's house was getting
over full. Two of his brothers were married and
had children. He promised to send money home
from America by post twice a year. His father
sold an old cow, a pair of piebald mountain ponies
of his own raising, and a cleared plot of fair pas-
ture land on the sunny slope of a pine-clad pass to
a Jew inn-keeper in order to pay the people of the
ship that took men to America to get rich in a
Amy Foster |
