| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: makes no matter. They always have their causes. There are
causes for ambition, courage, veracity, just as there are for
digestion, muscular movement, animal heat. Vice and virtue are
products like vitriol and sugar." When we read such
proclamations of the intellect bent on showing the existential
conditions of absolutely everything, we feel--quite apart from
our legitimate impatience at the somewhat ridiculous swagger of
the program, in view of what the authors are actually able to
perform--menaced and negated in the springs of our innermost
life. Such cold-blooded assimilations threaten, we think, to
undo our soul's vital secrets, as if the same breath which should
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Witch, et. al by Anton Chekhov: at once she understood and went numb all over.
"You've taken my land, so here you are!" Saying this Aksinya
snatched up the ladle with the boiling water and flung it over
Nikifor.
After this there was heard a scream such as had never been heard
before in Ukleevo, and no one would have believed that a little
weak creature like Lipa could scream like that. And it was
suddenly silent in the yard.
Aksinya walked into the house with her old naive smile. . . . The
deaf man kept moving about the yard with his arms full of linen,
then he began hanging it up again, in silence, without haste. And
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Weir of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson: undermine her husband with his son. As long as Archie remained silent,
she did so ruthlessly, with a single eye to heaven and the child's
salvation; but the day came when Archie spoke. It was 1801, and Archie
was seven, and beyond his years for curiosity and logic, when he brought
the case up openly. If judging were sinful and forbidden, how came papa
to be a judge? to have that sin for a trade? to bear the name of it for
a distinction?
"I can't see it," said the little Rabbi, and wagged his head.
Mrs. Weir abounded in commonplace replies.
"No, I cannae see it," reiterated Archie. "And I'll tell you what,
mamma, I don't think you and me's justifeed in staying with him."
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