| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce: nature was already effaced; he had power only to feel, and
feeling was torment. He was conscious of motion.
Encompassed in a luminous cloud, of which he was now merely
the fiery heart, without material substance, he swung
through unthinkable arcs of oscillation, like a vast
pendulum. Then all at once, with terrible suddenness, the
light about him shot upward with the noise of a loud splash;
a frightful roaring was in his ears, and all was cold and
dark. The power of thought was restored; he knew that the
rope had broken and he had fallen into the stream. There was
no additional strangulation; the noose about his neck
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Faraday as a Discoverer by John Tyndall: shown subsequently by Dulong and Thenard that even a platinum wire,
when perfectly cleansed, may be raised to incandescence by its
action on a jet of cold hydrogen.
In his experiments on the decomposition of water, Faraday found that
the positive platinum plate of the decomposing cell possessed in an
extraordinary degree the power of causing oxygen and hydrogen to
combine. He traced the cause of this to the perfect cleanness of
the positive plate. Against it was liberated oxygen, which, with the
powerful affinity of the 'nascent state,' swept away all impurity
from the surface against which it was liberated. The bubbles of gas
liberated on one of the platinum plates or wires of a decomposing
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Mother by Owen Wister: has been slightly remodelled for separate publication.
June 7, 1907, OWEN WISTER
MOTHER
When handsome young Richard Field--he was very handsome and very young--
announced to our assembled company that if his turn should really come to
tell us a story, the story should be no invention of his fancy, but a
page of truth, a chapter from his own life, in which himself was the hero
and a lovely, innocent girl was the heroine, his wife at once looked
extremely uncomfortable. She changed the reclining position in which she
had been leaning back in her chair, and she sat erect, with a hand closed
upon each arm of the chair.
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