| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Market-Place by Harold Frederic: "Curious--that thing happened to me once before,"
commented Thorpe, with ruminating slowness. "It was
out on the plains, years ago, and I was in pretty
hard luck, and was making my way alone from Tucson north,
and some cowboys held me up, and were going to make
kindling wood of me, they being under the impression
that I was a horse-thief they were looking after.
There was five or six minutes there when my life wasn't
worth a last year's bird's-nest--and I tell you, sir, I was
the scaredest man that ever drew the breath of life.
And then something happened to be said that put
The Market-Place |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Faith of Men by Jack London: wood stove and chatted in broken English with Neil Bonner. And he
came to look for her coming; and on the days she did not come he
was worried and restless. Sometimes he stopped to think, and then
she was met coldly, with a resolve that perplexed and piqued her,
and which, she was convinced, was not sincere. But more often he
did not dare to think, and then all went well and there were smiles
and laughter. And Amos Pentley, gasping like a stranded catfish,
his hollow cough a-reek with the grave, looked upon it all and
grinned. He, who loved life, could not live, and it rankled his
soul that others should be able to live. Wherefore he hated
Bonner, who was so very much alive and into whose eyes sprang joy
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Simple Soul by Gustave Flaubert: Like every other woman, she had had an affair of the heart. Her
father, who was a mason, was killed by falling from a scaffolding.
Then her mother died and her sisters went their different ways; a
farmer took her in, and while she was quite small, let her keep cows
in the fields. She was clad in miserable rags, beaten for the
slightest offence and finally dismissed for a theft of thirty sous
which she did not commit. She took service on another farm where she
tended the poultry; and as she was well thought of by her master, her
fellow-workers soon grew jealous.
One evening in August (she was then eighteen years old), they
persuaded her to accompany them to the fair at Colleville. She was
A Simple Soul |
