| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce: Or, cursed with consciences that bid them fly
To safer villainies of darker dye,
Forswearing robbery and fain, instead,
To steal (they call it "cornering") our bread
May see you groveling their boots to lick
And begging for the favor of a kick?
Still must you follow to the bitter end
Your sycophantic disposition's trend,
And in your eagerness to please the rich
Hunt hungry sinners to their final ditch?
In Morgan's praise you smite the sounding wire,
The Devil's Dictionary |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Pupil by Henry James: privately disown the stuff his people were made of. Morgan had in
secret a small loftiness which made him acute about betrayed
meanness; as well as a critical sense for the manners immediately
surrounding him that was quite without precedent in a juvenile
nature, especially when one noted that it had not made this nature
"old-fashioned," as the word is of children - quaint or wizened or
offensive. It was as if he had been a little gentleman and had
paid the penalty by discovering that he was the only such person in
his family. This comparison didn't make him vain, but it could
make him melancholy and a trifle austere. While Pemberton guessed
at these dim young things, shadows of shadows, he was partly drawn
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane: saw that the ground in the deep shadows was
cluttered with men, sprawling in every con-
ceivable posture. Glancing narrowly into the
more distant darkness, he caught occasional
glimpses of visages that loomed pallid and
ghostly, lit with a phosphorescent glow. These
faces expressed in their lines the deep stupor of
the tired soldiers. They made them appear like
men drunk with wine. This bit of forest might
have appeared to an ethereal wanderer as a scene
of the result of some frightful debauch.
The Red Badge of Courage |
