| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: in fact you've admitted to me as much - that I was leading, at any
time these thirty years, a selfish frivolous scandalous life. And
you see what it has made of me."
She just waited, smiling at him. "You see what it has made of ME."
"Oh you're a person whom nothing can have altered. You were born
to be what you are, anywhere, anyway: you've the perfection
nothing else could have blighted. And don't you see how, without
my exile, I shouldn't have been waiting till now - ?" But he
pulled up for the strange pang.
"The great thing to see," she presently said, "seems to me to be
that it has spoiled nothing. It hasn't spoiled your being here at
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane: loss of valuable knapsacks, and, on the whole,
very good shirts.
But the regiment was not yet veteranlike in
appearance. Veteran regiments in the army
were likely to be very small aggregations of men.
Once, when the command had first come to the
field, some perambulating veterans, noting the
length of their column, had accosted them thus:
"Hey, fellers, what brigade is that?" And when
the men had replied that they formed a regiment
and not a brigade, the older soldiers had laughed,
The Red Badge of Courage |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: Greatly to do and to suffer, and far in the fens and the forests
Smite the devourers of men, heaven-hated brood of the giants;
Transformed, strange, without like, who obey not the golden-haired
rulers.
These are figures whose divine moral beauty has sunk into the
hearts, not merely of poets or of artists, but of men and women
who suffered and who feared; the memory of them, fables though
they may have been, ennobled the old Greek heart; they ennobled
the heart of Europe in the fifteenth century, at the re-discovery
of Greek literature. So far from contradicting the Christian
ideal, they harmonised with--I had almost said they supplemented--
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