| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Oakdale Affair by Edgar Rice Burroughs: my father to know that I had nothing to do with it and
that they tried to kill me because I wouldn't promise to
keep still. It was the little one who murdered him--the
one they called 'Jimmie' and 'The Oskaloosa Kid.' The
big one drove the car--his name was 'Terry.' After they
killed him I tried to jump out--I had been sitting in
front with Terry--and then they dragged me over into
the tonneau and later--the Oskaloosa Kid tried to kill me
too, and threw me out."
Bridge heard the boy at his side gulp. The girl went
on.
The Oakdale Affair |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: recognition, on here a post, and there a garden fence, and here a
latticed window-pane, and there a pump, with its full trough of
water, and here again an arched door of oak, with an iron
knocker, and a rough log for the door-step. The Reverend Mr.
Dimmesdale noted all these minute particulars, even while firmly
convinced that the doom of his existence was stealing onward, in
the footsteps which he now heard; and that the gleam of the
lantern would fall upon him in a few moments more, and reveal his
long-hidden secret. As the light drew nearer, be beheld, within
its illuminated circle, his brother clergyman -- or, to speak
more accurately, his professional father, as well as highly
The Scarlet Letter |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: The knowledge with which he discerns good and evil.
Monster! I said; you have been carrying me round in a circle, and all this
time hiding from me the fact that the life according to knowledge is not
that which makes men act rightly and be happy, not even if knowledge
include all the sciences, but one science only, that of good and evil.
For, let me ask you, Critias, whether, if you take away this, medicine will
not equally give health, and shoemaking equally produce shoes, and the art
of the weaver clothes?--whether the art of the pilot will not equally save
our lives at sea, and the art of the general in war?
Quite so.
And yet, my dear Critias, none of these things will be well or beneficially
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