| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Twice Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: waistcoats, or roguishly pulled the long curls of their flowing
wigs. "But Governor Belcher has been dead this many a year,"
would the mother say to her little boy. "And did you really see
him at the Province House?" "Oh yes, dear mother! yes!" the
half-dreaming child would answer. "But when old Esther had done
speaking about him he faded away out of his chair." Thus, without
affrighting her little guests, she led them by the hand into the
chambers of her own desolate heart, and made childhood's fancy
discern the ghosts that haunted there.
Living so continually in her own circle of ideas, and never
regulating her mind by a proper reference to present things,
Twice Told Tales |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley: He then took a cursory view of the present state of the science
and explained many of its elementary terms. After having made a few
preparatory experiments, he concluded with a panegyric upon modern chemistry,
the terms of which I shall never forget: "The ancient teachers of this
science," said he, "promised impossibilities and performed nothing.
The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be
transmuted and that the elixir of life is a chimera but these philosophers,
whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over
the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate
into the recesses of nature and show how she works in her hiding-places.
They ascend into the heavens; they have discovered how the blood circulates,
Frankenstein |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Lesson of the Master by Henry James: before you went away, and how she liked you - you can intelligently
congratulate me."
"She has been so free!" Those words made a great impression on
Paul Overt, and he almost writhed under that irony in them as to
which it so little mattered whether it was designed or casual. Of
course she had been free, and appreciably perhaps by his own act;
for wasn't the Master's allusion to her having liked him a part of
the irony too? "I thought that by your theory you disapproved of a
writer's marrying."
"Surely - surely. But you don't call me a writer?"
"You ought to be ashamed," said Paul.
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