| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Weir of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson: poleetical. Ye must never ask me anything poleetical, Erchie. Your
faither is a great man, my dear, and it's no for me or you to be judging
him. It would be telling us all, if we behaved ourselves in our several
stations the way your faither does in his high office; and let me hear
no more of any such disrespectful and undutiful questions! No that you
meant to be undutiful, my lamb; your mother kens that - she kens it
well, dearie!" And so slid off to safer topics, and left on the mind of
the child an obscure but ineradicable sense of something wrong.
Mrs. Weir's philosophy of life was summed in one expression -
tenderness. In her view of the universe, which was all lighted up with
a glow out of the doors of hell, good people must walk there in a kind
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from One Basket by Edna Ferber: back while a great wave of depression swept over him. Nothing to
get up for. Store clothes on the chair by the bed. He was
taking it easy.
Back home on the farm in southern Illinois he had known the hour
the instant his eyes opened. Here the flat next door was so
close that the bed- room was in twilight even at midday. On the
farm he could tell by the feeling--an intangible thing, but
infallible. He could gauge the very quality of the blackness
that comes just before dawn. The crowing of the cocks, the
stamping of the cattle, the twittering of the birds in the old
elm whose branches were etched eerily against his window in the
One Basket |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from American Notes by Rudyard Kipling: "back-talk" of the Palmer House bar, the slang of the
barber-shops, the mental elevation and integrity of the Pullman
car porter, the dignity of the dime museum, and the accuracy of
the excited fish-wife. I am sternly forbidden to believe that
the paper educates the public. Then I am compelled to believe
that the public educate the paper; yet suicides on the press are
rare.
Just when the sense of unreality and oppression was strongest
upon me, and when I most wanted help, a man sat at my side and
began to talk what he called politics.
I had chanced to pay about six shillings for a travelling-cap
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