| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories by Alice Dunbar: open oysters, or wrap up fruit and candy, or count out wood and
coal into infinitesimal portions, or do her housework; but the
knitting was snatched with avidity at the first spare moment, and
the worn, white, blue-marked fingers, half enclosed in kid-glove
stalls for protection, would writhe and twist in and out again.
Little girls just learning to crochet borrowed their patterns
from Tony's wife, and it was considered quite a mark of
advancement to have her inspect a bit of lace done by eager,
chubby fingers. The ladies in larger houses, whose husbands
would be millionaires some day, bought her lace, and gave it to
their servants for Christmas presents.
The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Father Sergius by Leo Tolstoy: She was silent.
'His mistress?'
She did not answer.
He sprang up and stood before her with trembling jaws, pale as
death. He now remembered how the Emperor, meeting him on the
Nevsky, had amiably congratulated him.
'O God, what have I done! Stiva!'
'Don't touch me! Don't touch me! Oh, how it pains!'
He turned away and went to the house. There he met her mother.
'What is the matter, Prince? I . . .' She became silent on
seeing his face. The blood had suddenly rushed to his head.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: another is Emersonianism or New England transcendentalism;
another is Berkeleyan idealism; another is spiritism, with its
messages of "law" and "progress" and "development"; another the
optimistic popular science evolutionism of which I have recently
spoken; and, finally, Hinduism has contributed a strain. But the
most characteristic feature of the mind-cure movement is an
inspiration much more direct. The leaders in this faith have had
an intuitive belief in the all-saving power of healthy-minded
attitudes as such, in the conquering efficacy of courage, hope,
and trust, and a correlative contempt for doubt, fear, worry, and
all nervously precautionary states of mind.[44] Their belief has
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