| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne: be resisted -- she felt or fancied, then, that the scarlet letter
had endowed her with a new sense. She shuddered to believe, yet
could not help believing, that it gave her a sympathetic
knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts. She was terror-
stricken by the revelations that were thus made. What were they?
Could they be other than the insidious whispers of the bad
angel, who would fain have persuaded the struggling woman, as yet
only half his victim, that the outward guise of purity was but a
lie, and that, if truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet
letter would blaze forth on many a bosom besides Hester Prynne's?
Or, must she receive those intimations -- so obscure, yet so
The Scarlet Letter |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Selected Writings of Guy De Maupassant by Guy De Maupassant: detachment showed nothing but a vague shadow on the ground, as
the men lay on the snow, and I gave my orders in a low voice, and
heard the harsh, metallic sound of the cocking of rifles. There,
in the middle of the plain, some strange object was moving about.
It might have been taken for some enormous animal running about,
which uncoiled itself like a serpent, or came together into a
coil, then suddenly went quickly to the right or left, stopped,
and then went on again. But presently the wandering shape came
near, and I saw a dozen lancers, one behind the other, who were
trying to find their way, which they had lost.
"By this time they were so near that I could hear the panting of
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau: to any other millions, why expose yourself to this
overwhelming brute force? You do not resist cold and
hunger, the winds and the waves, thus obstinately; you
quietly submit to a thousand similar necessities. You do
not put your head into the fire. But just in proportion as
I regard this as not wholly a brute force, but partly a
human force, and consider that I have relations to those
millions as to so many millions of men, and not of mere
brute or inanimate things, I see that appeal is possible,
first and instantaneously, from them to the Maker of them,
and, secondly, from them to themselves. But if I put my
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience |
