| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Exiles by Honore de Balzac: scale of spheres, just as the plant is divided from man by an infinite
number of grades. He peopled the heavens, the stars, the planets, the
sun.
Quoting Saint Paul, he invested man with a new power; he might rise,
from globe to globe, to the very Fount of eternal life. Jacob's
mystical ladder was both the religious formula and the traditional
proof of the fact. He soared through space, carrying with him the
passionate souls of his hearers on the wings of his word, making them
feel the infinite, and bathing them in the heavenly sea. Then the
Doctor accounted logically for hell by circles placed in inverse order
to the shining spheres that lead to God, in which torments and
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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: Those performances which had been witnessed
by his fellows marched now in wide purple and
gold, having various deflections. They went
gayly with music. It was pleasure to watch these
things. He spent delightful minutes viewing the
gilded images of memory.
He saw that he was good. He recalled with
a thrill of joy the respectful comments of his fel-
lows upon his conduct.
Nevertheless, the ghost of his flight from
the first engagement appeared to him and
The Red Badge of Courage |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald: The argument ended nowhere, but Amory noticed more than ever how
the sentiment toward Burne had changed on the campus.
"It's odd," Amory said to Tom one night when they had grown more
amicable on the subject, "that the people who violently
disapprove of Burne's radicalism are distinctly the Pharisee
classI mean they're the best-educated men in collegethe editors
of the papers, like yourself and Ferrenby, the younger
professors.... The illiterate athletes like Langueduc think he's
getting eccentric, but they just say, 'Good old Burne has got
some queer ideas in his head,' and pass onthe Pharisee classGee!
they ridicule him unmercifully."
This Side of Paradise |
