| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: from juvenility to senility without ever touching maturity except in
body. The classes which cannot afford this sustained tutelage are
notably more self-reliant and grown-up: an office boy of fifteen is
often more of a man than a university student of twenty.
Unfortunately this precocity is disabled by poverty, ignorance,
narrowness, and a hideous power of living without art or love or
beauty and being rather proud of it. The poor never escape from
servitude: their docility is preserved by their slavery. And so all
become the prey of the greedy, the selfish, the domineering, the
unscrupulous, the predatory. If here and there an individual refuses
to be docile, ten docile persons will beat him or lock him up or shoot
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Where There's A Will by Mary Roberts Rinehart: rabbit bunted into me head on, and would have scared me into a
chill if I hadn't been shaking already. The two behind me were
cheerful enough. Mr. Dick pointed out the general direction of
the deer park which hides the shelter-house from the sanatorium,
and if you'll believe it, with snow so thick I had to scrape it
off the lantern every minute or so, those children planned to
give something called A Midsummer Night's Dream in the deer
park among the trees in the spring, to entertain the
patients.
"I wish to heaven I'd wake up and find all THIS a dream," I
called back over my shoulder. But they were busy with costumes
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: and his sister. He had then gone out, as he said, for a stroll;
than which nothing, I reflected, could better have expressed
his frank view of the abrupt transformation of my office.
What he would not permit this office to consist of was yet
to be settled: there was a queer relief, at all events--I mean
for myself in especial--in the renouncement of one pretension.
If so much had sprung to the surface, I scarce put it too
strongly in saying that what had perhaps sprung highest
was the absurdity of our prolonging the fiction that I had
anything more to teach him. It sufficiently stuck out that,
by tacit little tricks in which even more than myself he carried
|
