The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Phantasmagoria and Other Poems by Lewis Carroll: At such a moment ladies learn to give,
To partners who would urge them over-much,
A flat and yet decided negative -
Photographers love such.
There comes a welcome summons - hope revives,
And fading eyes grow bright, and pulses quicken:
Incessant pop the corks, and busy knives
Dispense the tongue and chicken.
Flushed with new life, the crowd flows back again:
And all is tangled talk and mazy motion -
Much like a waving field of golden grain,
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Wyoming by William MacLeod Raine: yesterday."
"Dear me! Is it your business to go around shooting people?
That's three I happen to know that you have shot. How many more?"
"No more, ma'am--not recently."
"Well, three is quite enough--recently," she mimicked. "You seem
to me a good deal of a desperado."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Don't say 'Yes, ma'am,' like that, as if it didn't matter in the
least whether you are or not," she ordered.
"No, ma'am."
"Oh!" She broke off with a gesture of impatience at his burlesque
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: result, he is permitted no say in the affair whatever. In fact,
it is not his affair at all, but his father's. His hand is simply
made a cat's-paw of. The matter is entirely a business transaction,
entered into by the parent and conducted through regular marriage
brokers. In it he plays only the part of a marionette. His revenge
for being thus bartered out of what might be the better half of his
life, he takes eventually on the next succeeding generation.
His death may be said to be the most important act of his whole life.
For then only can his personal existence be properly considered to
begin. By it he joins the great company of ancestors who are to
these people of almost more consequence than living folk, and of
|