| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne: Surely, it must have been at no slight cost that he had thus
fortified his soul with iron. Such calmness is a mightier effort
than the violence of weaker men. And there was yet a heavy task
for him to do. Was it a little matter--a trifle to be prepared
for in a single moment, and to be rested from in another moment,
--that he must now, after thirty years, encounter a kinsman
risen from a living tomb, and wrench a secret from him, or else
consign him to a living tomb again?
"Did you speak?" asked Hepzibah, looking in from the threshold
of the parlor; for she imagined that the Judge had uttered some
sound which she was anxious to interpret as a relenting impulse.
House of Seven Gables |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Walking by Henry David Thoreau: his instincts, that he would not part with it for any
consideration, on account of the mud which it contained. And that
man intends to put a girdling ditch round the whole in the course
of forty months, and so redeem it by the magic of his spade. I
refer to him only as the type of a class.
The weapons with which we have gained our most important
victories, which should be handed down as heirlooms from father
to son, are not the sword and the lance, but the bushwhack, the
turf-cutter, the spade, and the bog hoe, rusted with the blood of
many a meadow, and begrimed with the dust of many a hard-fought
field. The very winds blew the Indian's cornfield into the
Walking |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo: beard.
The sweat, the heat, the journey on foot, the dust, added I know
not what sordid quality to this dilapidated whole. His hair was
closely cut, yet bristling, for it had begun to grow a little,
and did not seem to have been cut for some time.
No one knew him. He was evidently only a chance passer-by. Whence
came he? From the south; from the seashore, perhaps, for he made his
entrance into D---- by the same street which, seven months previously,
had witnessed the passage of the Emperor Napoleon on his way
from Cannes to Paris. This man must have been walking all day.
He seemed very much fatigued. Some women of the ancient market town
Les Miserables |
