| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton: Miss Blenker looked at him with surprise. "Madame
Olenska--didn't you know she'd been called away?"
"Called away?--"
"Oh, my best parasol! I lent it to that goose of a
Katie, because it matched her ribbons, and the careless
thing must have dropped it here. We Blenkers are all
like that . . . real Bohemians!" Recovering the
sunshade with a powerful hand she unfurled it and
suspended its rosy dome above her head. "Yes, Ellen was
called away yesterday: she lets us call her Ellen, you
know. A telegram came from Boston: she said she
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Iliad by Homer: fists. One could hear the horrid crashing of their jaws, and they
sweated from every pore of their skin. Presently Epeus came on
and gave Euryalus a blow on the jaw as he was looking round;
Euryalus could not keep his legs; they gave way under him in a
moment and he sprang up with a bound, as a fish leaps into the
air near some shore that is all bestrewn with sea-wrack, when
Boreas furs the top of the waves, and then falls back into deep
water. But noble Epeus caught hold of him and raised him up; his
comrades also came round him and led him from the ring, unsteady
in his gait, his head hanging on one side, and spitting great
clots of gore. They set him down in a swoon and then went to
The Iliad |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: However, it also was severely criticized as a plagiary of the
Finnish epic poem Kalevala. Longfellow made no secret of the
fact that he had used the meter of the Kalevala; but as for the
legends, he openly gave credit to Schoolcraft in his notes to the
poem.
I would add a personal note here. My father's roots include
Ojibway Indians: his mother, Margaret Caroline Davenport, was a
daughter of Susan des Carreaux, O-gee-em-a-qua (The Chief Woman),
Davenport whose mother was a daughter of Chief Waub-o-jeeg.
Finally, my mother used to rock me to sleep reading portions of
Hiawatha to me, especially:
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