| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis: Babbitt, at the end of a steel and cement aisle ending in vast barred gates.
With melancholy he looked back at the last suburb of Zenith.
All the way north he pictured the Maine guides: simple and strong and daring,
jolly as they played stud-poker in their unceiled shack, wise in woodcraft as
they tramped the forest and shot the rapids. He particularly remembered Joe
Paradise, half Yankee, half Indian. If he could but take up a backwoods claim
with a man like Joe, work hard with his hands, be free and noisy in a flannel
shirt, and never come back to this dull decency!
Or, like a trapper in a Northern Canada movie, plunge through the forest, make
camp in the Rockies, a grim and wordless caveman! Why not? He COULD do it!
There'd be enough money at home for the family to live on till Verona was
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Illustrious Gaudissart by Honore de Balzac: artistic, poetic, voluptuous, yet whose first impulses subside
quickly. The softness of the atmosphere, the beauty of the climate, a
certain ease of life and joviality of manners, smother before long the
sentiment of art, narrow the widest heart, and enervate the strongest
will. Transplant the Tourangian, and his fine qualities develop and
lead to great results, as we may see in many spheres of action: look
at Rabelais and Semblancay, Plantin the printer and Descartes,
Boucicault, the Napoleon of his day, and Pinaigrier, who painted most
of the colored glass in our cathedrals; also Verville and Courier. But
the Tourangian, distinguished though he may be in other regions, sits
in his own home like an Indian on his mat or a Turk on his divan. He
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: clash of duties. How far is he to make his neighbour happy? How
far must he respect that smiling face, so easy to cloud, so hard to
brighten again? And how far, on the other side, is he bound to be
his brother's keeper and the prophet of his own morality? How far
must he resent evil?
The difficulty is that we have little guidance; Christ's sayings on
the point being hard to reconcile with each other, and (the most of
them) hard to accept. But the truth of his teaching would seem to
be this: in our own person and fortune, we should be ready to
accept and to pardon all; it is OUR cheek we are to turn, OUR coat
that we are to give away to the man who has taken OUR cloak. But
|
