| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Somebody's Little Girl by Martha Young: why. She forgot after awhile how she had been so full of sorrow
when Sister Justina said, Be Ashamed, and she could no longer
remember why she was glad; only a feeling of both was left--and she
could not tell how or why.
But the lady would not let Bessie Bell get far from her, and Bessie
did not care to go far from her. She stood with her little pink
hands folded, and looked up at the lady who held to her so closely.
Sister Helen Vincula said: ``It was Sister Theckla who spent that
summer with the sick, and it was Sister Theckla who brought the
child to us. Can you not go home with us? Or I could write to you
at once--''
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: to the first bend, she waved at me and disappeared.
I was left alone with this new feeling of lightness and content.
I sat down in the middle of the garden, where snakes could scarcely
approach unseen, and leaned my back against a warm yellow pumpkin.
There were some ground-cherry bushes growing along the furrows,
full of fruit. I turned back the papery triangular sheaths that protected
the berries and ate a few. All about me giant grasshoppers, twice as big
as any I had ever seen, were doing acrobatic feats among the dried vines.
The gophers scurried up and down the ploughed ground. There in the sheltered
draw-bottom the wind did not blow very hard, but I could hear it singing
its humming tune up on the level, and I could see the tall grasses wave.
My Antonia |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Phaedo by Plato: body which brings destruction to the soul may be unknown to any of us, for
no one of us can have had any experience of it: and if so, then I maintain
that he who is confident about death has but a foolish confidence, unless
he is able to prove that the soul is altogether immortal and imperishable.
But if he cannot prove the soul's immortality, he who is about to die will
always have reason to fear that when the body is disunited, the soul also
may utterly perish.
All of us, as we afterwards remarked to one another, had an unpleasant
feeling at hearing what they said. When we had been so firmly convinced
before, now to have our faith shaken seemed to introduce a confusion and
uncertainty, not only into the previous argument, but into any future one;
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