| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Extracts From Adam's Diary by Mark Twain: perfectly plain that they are the same breed. I was going to stuff
one of them for my collection, but she is prejudiced against it
for some reason or other; so I have relinquished the idea, though
I think it is a mistake. It would be an irreparable loss to science
if they should get away. The old one is tamer than it was, and
can laugh and talk like the parrot, having learned this, no doubt,
from being with the parrot so much, and having the imitative faculty
in a highly developed degree. I shall be astonished if it turns
out to be a new kind of parrot, and yet I ought not to be astonished,
for it has already been everything else it could think of, since
those first days when it was a fish. The new one is as ugly now
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Seraphita by Honore de Balzac: promised seven hundred years of plenty to her best-beloved daughter.
Then came the most formidable of all, the Child, weeping at her knees,
and saying, 'Wilt thou leave me, feeble and suffering as I am? oh, my
mother, stay!' and he played with her, and shed languor on the air,
and the Heavens themselves had pity for his wail. The Virgin of pure
song brought forth her choirs to relax the soul. The Kings of the East
came with their slaves, their armies, and their women; the Wounded
asked her for succor, the Sorrowful stretched forth their hands: 'Do
not leave us! do not leave us!' they cried. I, too, I cried, 'Do not
leave us! we adore thee! stay!' Flowers, bursting from the seed,
bathed her in their fragrance which uttered, 'Stay!' The giant Enakim
Seraphita |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce: separate sounds as they struck. He looked at the forest on
the bank of the stream, saw the individual trees, the leaves
and the veining of each leaf -- he saw the very insects upon
them: the locusts, the brilliant bodied flies, the gray
spiders stretching their webs from twig to twig. He noted
the prismatic colors in all the dewdrops upon a million
blades of grass. The humming of the gnats that danced above
the eddies of the stream, the beating of the dragon flies'
wings, the strokes of the water spiders' legs, like oars
which had lifted their boat -- all these made audible
music. A fish slid along beneath his eyes and he heard the
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge |
