| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: funeral was the only time I was ever in my grandmother's house.
Don't that seem strange?'
While she talked, I lay back in the hot sand and looked up at
the blue sky between the flat bouquets of elder. I could hear
the bees humming and singing, but they stayed up in the sun above
the flowers and did not come down into the shadow of the leaves.
Antonia seemed to me that day exactly like the little girl who used
to come to our house with Mr. Shimerda.
`Some day, Tony, I am going over to your country,
and I am going to the little town where you lived.
Do you remember all about it?'
My Antonia |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: Olympian majesty and imperial supremacy among the lesser forest-
growths, that my heart stopped short, then jumped at my ribs as a
hunter springs at a five-barred gate, and I felt all through me,
without need of uttering the words, - "This is it!"
You will find this tree described, with many others, in the
excellent Report upon the Trees and Shrubs of Massachusetts. The
author has given my friend the Professor credit for some of his
measurements, but measured this tree himself, carefully. It is a
grand elm for size of trunk, spread of limbs, and muscular
development, - one of the first, perhaps the first, of the first
class of New England elms.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Before Adam by Jack London: elbow and mock me. Thus did our fight transform itself
into a game of hide and seek.
All afternoon, with occasional intervals, we kept it
up, and a playful, friendly spirit arose between us.
In the end, he did not run away from me, and we sat
together with our arms around each other. A little
later he disclosed the mystery of the wide-mouthed
cave. Holding me by the hand he led me inside. It
connected by a narrow crevice with another cave, and it
was through this that we regained the open air.
We were now good friends. When the other young ones
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