| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: one; if I deny what seems to me the palpable historic fact, that those
wild Koreish had in them a reason and a conscience, which could awaken
to that message, and perceive its boundless beauty, its boundless
importance, and that they did accept that message, and lived by it in
proportion as they received it fully, such lives as no men in those
times, and few in after times, have been able to live. If I feel, as I
do feel, that Abubekr, Omar, Abu Obeidah, and Amrou, were better men
than I am, I must throw away all that Philo--all that a Higher
authority--has taught me: or I must attribute their lofty virtues to
the one source of all in man which is not selfishness, and fancy, and
fury, and blindness as of the beasts which perish.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Moon-Face and Other Stories by Jack London: man did not hesitate. His foot pressed the impossible surface for but a
fraction of the fatal second and gave him the bound that carried him onward.
Again, where even the fraction of a second's footing was out of the question,
he would swing his body past by a moment's hand-grip on a jutting knob of
rock, a crevice, or a precariously rooted shrub. At last, with a wild leap and
yell, he exchanged the face of the wall for an earth-slide and finished the
descent in the midst of several tons of sliding earth and gravel.
His first pan of the morning washed out over two dollars in coarse gold. It
was from the centre of the "V." To either side the diminution in the values of
the pans was swift. His lines of crosscutting holes were growing very short.
The converging sides of the inverted "V" were only a few yards apart. Their
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Pierre Grassou by Honore de Balzac: "and I sold them one by one to Elie Magus for less than ten thousand
francs the whole lot."
"Prove it to me," said the bottle-dealer, "and I double my daughter's
'dot,' for if it is so, you are Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, Gerard
Douw!"
"And Magus is a famous picture-dealer!" said the painter, who now saw
the meaning of the misty and aged look imparted to his pictures in
Elie's shop, and the utility of the subjects the picture-dealer had
required of him.
Far from losing the esteem of his admiring bottle-merchant, Monsieur
de Fougeres (for so the family persisted in calling Pierre Grassou)
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