| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Troll Garden and Selected Stories by Willa Cather: about music, and I understood why. She was a pious woman; she
had the consolations of religion and, to her at least, her
martyrdom was not wholly sordid. Once when I had been doggedly
beating out some easy passages from an old score of
Euryanthe I had found among her music books, she came up to
me and, putting her hands over my eyes, gently drew my head back
upon her shoulder, saying tremulously, "Don't love it so well,
Clark, or it may be taken from you. Oh, dear boy, pray that
whatever your sacrifice may be, it be not that."
When my aunt appeared on the morning after her arrival she
was still in a semi-somnambulant state. She seemed not to realize
The Troll Garden and Selected Stories |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Lady Baltimore by Owen Wister: He pondered, wrinkling his forehead. "Well, but all the same, didn't we
give the present hour a pretty black eye?"
"The present hour deserves a black eye, and two of them!"
He surveyed me squarely. "I believe you're a pessimist!"
"That is the first trashy thing I've heard you say."
"Thank you! At least admit you're scarcely an optimist."
"Optimist! Pessimist! Why, you're talking just like a newspaper!"
He laughed. "Oh, don't compare a gentleman to a newspaper."
"Then keep your vocabulary clean of bargain-counter words. A while ago
the journalists had a furious run upon the adjective 'un-American.'
Anybody or anything that displeased them was 'un-American.' They ran it
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Firm of Nucingen by Honore de Balzac: be quite comfortable.'
"In three days' time our Godefroid was comfortable. His increase of
income exactly supplied his superfluities; his material happiness was
complete.
"Suppose that it were possible to read the minds of all the young men
in Paris at one glance (as, it appears, will be done at the Day of
Judgment with all the millions upon millions that have groveled in all
spheres, and worn all uniforms or the uniform of nature), and to ask
them whether happiness at six-and-twenty is or is not made up of the
following items--to wit, to own a saddle-horse and a tilbury, or a
cab, with a fresh, rosy-faced Toby Joby Paddy no bigger than your
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