| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Profits of Religion by Upton Sinclair: reforms required an elaborate campaign of publicity--and of
course long before they could be put into practice, the
politicians would be ready with devices to make them of no
effect.
Soon after this, my ethical professor resigned and went to
hunting spooks. I don't want to be unfair to him; I know that he
is a determined and courageous man, and it seems possible that he
may really have bagged some spooks. All I wish to point out here
is the method he uses in seeking to persuade the heedless rich to
support the spook-hunting industry. The very same argument as we
got from the University of Geneva and the University of Toronto!
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain: hunt for turtle eggs on the bar. They
went about poking sticks into the sand,
and when they found a soft place they
went down on their knees and dug with
their hands. Sometimes they would take
fifty or sixty eggs out of one hole. They were perfectly
round white things a trifle smaller than an English
walnut. They had a famous fried-egg feast that night,
and another on Friday morning.
After breakfast they went whooping and prancing
out on the bar, and chased each other round and
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde: In black fantastic shapes, dumb shadows crawl into the corners
of the room and crouch there. Outside, there is the stirring
of birds among the leaves, or the sound of men going forth
to their work, or the sigh and sob of the wind coming down from
the hills and wandering round the silent house, as though it feared
to wake the sleepers and yet must needs call forth sleep from
her purple cave. Veil after veil of thin dusky gauze is lifted,
and by degrees the forms and colours of things are restored to them,
and we watch the dawn remaking the world in its antique pattern.
The wan mirrors get back their mimic life. The flameless tapers
stand where we had left them, and beside them lies the half-cut book
The Picture of Dorian Gray |
