| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from McTeague by Frank Norris: putting out her hands. "Wait. You don't understand. I
have got something to say to you." She might as well have
talked to the wind. McTeague put aside her hands with a
single gesture, and gripped her to him in a bearlike embrace
that all but smothered her. Trina was but a reed before that
giant strength. McTeague turned her face to his and kissed
her again upon the mouth. Where was all Trina's resolve
then? Where was her carefully prepared little speech?
Where was all her hesitation and torturing doubts of the
last few days? She clasped McTeague's huge red neck with
both her slender arms; she raised her adorable little chin
McTeague |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Davis: while they jeered at him. It was a curious fancy in the man,
almost a passion. The few hours for rest he spent hewing and
hacking with his blunt knife, never speaking, until his watch
came again,--working at one figure for months, and, when it was
finished, breaking it to pieces perhaps, in a fit of
disappointment. A morbid, gloomy man, untaught, unled, left to
feed his soul in grossness and crime, and hard, grinding labor.
I want you to come down and look at this Wolfe, standing there
among the lowest of his kind, and see him just as he is, that
you may judge him justly when you hear the story of this night.
I want you to look back, as he does every day, at his birth in
Life in the Iron-Mills |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Golden Sayings of Epictetus by Epictetus: actual life, men not only object to offer themselves to be
convinced, but hate the man who has convinced them. Whereas
Socrates used to say that we should never lead a life not
subjected to examination.
XLVIII
This is the reason why Socrates, when reminded that he
should prepare for his trial, answered: "Thinkest thou not that I
have been preparing for it all my life?"
"In what way?"
"I have maintained that which in me lay/"
"How so?"
The Golden Sayings of Epictetus |
