| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Heart of the West by O. Henry: big as an order of spinach was spiked onto his front. And he was
smirking and warping his face like an infernal storekeeper or a kid
with colic.
"Hello, Andy," says Mack, out of his face. "Glad to see you back.
Things have happened since you went away."
"I know it," says I, "and a sacrilegious sight it is. God never made
you that way, Mack Lonsbury. Why do you scarify His works with this
presumptuous kind of ribaldry?"
"Why, Andy," says he, "they've elected me justice of the peace since
you left."
I looked at Mack close. He was restless and inspired. A justice of the
Heart of the West |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac: random, know how great an influence may be exercised on more important
events by apparently trivial incidents, and will not be surprised at
the weight here given to the following minor fact. Next day Popinot
had an attack of coryza, a complaint which is not dangerous, and
generally known by the absurd and inadequate name of a cold in the
head.
The judge, who could not suppose that the delay could be serious,
feeling himself a little feverish, kept his room, and did not go to
see the Marquis d'Espard. This day lost was, to this affair, what on
the Day of Dupes the cup of soup had been, taken by Marie de Medici,
which, by delaying her meeting with Louis XIII., enabled Richelieu to
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Lesson of the Master by Henry James: the artist's business."
"The artist - the artist! Isn't he a man all the same?"
St. George had a grand grimace. "I mostly think not. You know as
well as I what he has to do: the concentration, the finish, the
independence he must strive for from the moment he begins to wish
his work really decent. Ah my young friend, his relation to women,
and especially to the one he's most intimately concerned with, is
at the mercy of the damning fact that whereas he can in the nature
of things have but one standard, they have about fifty. That's
what makes them so superior," St. George amusingly added. "Fancy
an artist with a change of standards as you'd have a change of
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