| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Mountains by Stewart Edward White: little Spanish-American town on the seacoast need
have nothing to fear from the ascent. In some spots
they contract to an arm's length of space, outside of
which limit they drop sheer away; elsewhere they
stand up on end, zigzag in lacets each more hair-
raising than the last, or fill to demoralization with
loose boulders and shale. A fall on the part of your
horse would mean a more than serious accident; but
Western horses do not fall. The major premise stands:
even the casual tourist has no real reason for fear,
however scared he may become.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Vicar of Tours by Honore de Balzac: day, his life is attached to that of a vast country; sooner or later
his family will be, it is predicted, the entire universe.
Will this moral cosmopolitanism, the hope of Christian Rome, prove to
be only a sublime error? It is so natural to believe in the
realization of a noble vision, in the Brotherhood of Man. But, alas!
the human machine does not have such divine proportions. Souls that
are vast enough to grasp a range of feelings bestowed on great men
only will never belong to either fathers of families or simple
citizens. Some physiologists have thought that as the brain enlarges
the heart narrows; but they are mistaken. The apparent egotism of men
who bear a science, a nation, a code of laws in their bosom is the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Hated Son by Honore de Balzac: attending the birth of Etienne were renewed at the death of his
mother. The same tempest, same agony, same dread of awaking the
pitiless giant, who, on this occasion at least, slept soundly.
Bertrand, as a further precaution, took Etienne in his arms and
carried him through the duke's room, intending to give some excuse as
to the state of the duchess if the duke awoke and detected him.
Etienne's heart was horribly wrung by the same fears which filled the
minds of these faithful servants; but this emotion prepared him, in a
measure, for the sight that met his eyes in that signorial room, which
he had never re-entered since the fatal day when, as a child, the
paternal curse had driven him from it.
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