| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Last War: A World Set Free by H. G. Wells: first starry and then paler with a light that crept from north to
east as the dawn came on. The Milky Way was invisible in the
blue, and the lesser stars vanished. The face of the adventurer
at the steering-wheel, darkly visible ever and again by the oval
greenish glow of the compass face, had something of that firm
beauty which all concentrated purpose gives, and something of the
happiness of an idiot child that has at last got hold of the
matches. His companion, a less imaginative type, sat with his
legs spread wide over the long, coffin-shaped box which contained
in its compartments the three atomic bombs, the new bombs that
would continue to explode indefinitely and which no one so far
The Last War: A World Set Free |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Fanny Herself by Edna Ferber: "Yes."
The nurse seemed to be there, somehow, miraculously. And
the morning came. And in the kitchen Annie went about her
work, a little more quietly than usual. And yesterday
seemed far away. It was afternoon; it was twilight. Doctor
Hertz had been there for hours. The last time he
brought another doctor with him--Thorn. Mrs. Brandeis was
not talking now. But she was breathing. It filled the
room, that breathing; it filled the house. Fanny took her
mother's hand, that hand with the work-hardened palm and the
broken nails. It was very cold. She looked down at it.
Fanny Herself |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: auto-intoxicated by some organ or other, no matter which--and the
rest. But now, I ask you, how can such an existential account of
facts of mental history decide in one way or another upon their
spiritual significance? According to the general postulate of
psychology just referred to, there is not a single one of our
states of mind, high or low, healthy or morbid, that has not some
organic process as its condition. Scientific theories are
organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are;
and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should
doubtless see "the liver" determining the dicta of the sturdy
atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under
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