| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Cavalry General by Xenophon: Indeed, to put the matter in a nutshell, there is small risk a general
will be regarded with contempt by those he leads, if, whatever he may
have to preach, he shows himself best able to perform.
Beginning with the simple art of mounting on horseback, let him so
train himself in all particulars of horsemanship that, to look at him,
the men must see their leader is a horseman who can leap a trench
unscathed or scale a parapet,[3] or gallop down a bank, and hurl a
javelin with the best. These are accomplishments which one and all
will pave the way to make contempt impossible. If, further, the men
shall see in their commander one who, with the knowledge how to act,
has force of will and cunning to make them get the better of the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane: hension.
The skirmish fire increased to a long chatter-
ing sound. With it was mingled far-away cheer-
ing. A battery spoke.
Directly the youth would see the skirmishers
running. They were pursued by the sound of
musketry fire. After a time the hot, dangerous
flashes of the rifles were visible. Smoke clouds
went slowly and insolently across the fields like
observant phantoms. The din became crescendo,
like the roar of an oncoming train.
The Red Badge of Courage |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: they were of a gentleness so extraordinary. I used to speculate--
but even this with a dim disconnectedness--as to how the rough future
(for all futures are rough!) would handle them and might bruise them.
They had the bloom of health and happiness; and yet,
as if I had been in charge of a pair of little grandees,
of princes of the blood, for whom everything, to be right,
would have to be enclosed and protected, the only form that,
in my fancy, the afteryears could take for them was that of
a romantic, a really royal extension of the garden and the park.
It may be, of course, above all, that what suddenly broke
into this gives the previous time a charm of stillness--
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