| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Heritage of the Desert by Zane Grey: Branding the cows and yearlings and tame steers which watered at Silver
Cup, and never wandered far away, was play according to Dave's version.
"Wait till we get after the wild steers up on the mountain and in the
canyons," he would say when Jack dropped like a log at supper. Work it
certainly was for him. At night he was so tired that he could scarcely
crawl into bed; his back felt as if it were broken; his legs were raw,
and his bones ached. Many mornings he thought it impossible to arise,
but always he crawled out, grim and haggard, and hobbled round the
camp-fire to warm his sore and bruised muscles. Then when Zeke and
George rode in with the horses the day's work began. During these weeks
of his "hardening up," as Dave called it, Hare bore much pain, but he
The Heritage of the Desert |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne: found me wide awake and feverish, the victim of my own
enchantments!"
"There must have been a sort of happiness in all this," said I,
smitten with a strange longing to make proof of it.
"There may be happiness in a fever fit," replied the author. "And
then the various moods in which I wrote! Sometimes my ideas were
like precious stones under the earth, requiring toil to dig them
up, and care to polish and brighten them; but often a delicious
stream of thought would gush out upon the page at once, like
water sparkling up suddenly in the desert; and when it had
passed, I gnawed my pen hopelessly, or blundered on with cold and
The Snow Image |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Frankenstein by Mary Shelley: I retired to rest at night; my slumbers, as it were, waited on and
ministered to by the assemblance of grand shapes which I had
contemplated during the day. They congregated round me; the
unstained snowy mountaintop, the glittering pinnacle, the pine woods,
and ragged bare ravine, the eagle, soaring amidst the clouds--
they all gathered round me and bade me be at peace.
Where had they fled when the next morning I awoke? All of soul-
inspiriting fled with sleep, and dark melancholy clouded every thought.
The rain was pouring in torrents, and thick mists hid the summits of
the mountains, so that I even saw not the faces of those mighty friends.
Still I would penetrate their misty veil and seek them in their
Frankenstein |
