| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Children of the Night by Edwin Arlington Robinson: And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
Two Octaves
I
Not by the grief that stuns and overwhelms
All outward recognition of revealed
And righteous omnipresence are the days
Of most of us affrighted and diseased,
But rather by the common snarls of life
That come to test us and to strengthen us
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Schoolmistress and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov: irreproachable like the Armenian girl's, I fancy her face would
have lost all its charm from the change.
Standing at the window talking, the girl, shrugging at the
evening damp, continually looking round at us, at one moment put
her arms akimbo, at the next raised her hands to her head to
straighten her hair, talked, laughed, while her face at one
moment wore an expression of wonder, the next of horror, and I
don't remember a moment when her face and body were at rest. The
whole secret and magic of her beauty lay just in these tiny,
infinitely elegant movements, in her smile, in the play of her
face, in her rapid glances at us, in the combination of the
The Schoolmistress and Other Stories |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau: wisdom and honesty, nevertheless? Can we not count upon
some independent votes? Are there not many individuals in
the country who do not attend conventions? But no: I find
that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted
from his position, and despairs of his country, when his
country has more reasons to despair of him. He forthwith
adopts one of the candidates thus selected as the only
available one, thus proving that he is himself available for
any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no more worth
than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native,
who may have been bought. O for a man who is a man, and,
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience |
