| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: scullers, you remember,) then say if you begin to feel a little
warmed up or not! You can row easily and gently all day, and you
can row yourself blind and black in the face in ten minutes, just
as you like. It has been long agreed that there is no way in which
a man can accomplish so much labor with his muscles as in rowing.
It is in the boat, then, that man finds the largest extension of
his volitional and muscular existence; and yet he may tax both of
them so slightly, in that most delicious of exercises, that he
shall mentally write his sermon, or his poem, or recall the remarks
he has made in company and put them in form for the public, as well
as in his easy-chair.
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Edingburgh Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson: of Thomas the Rhymer, and some day, when it is least
expected, may take a thought to revisit the sunlit upper
world. That will be a strange moment for the cabmen on
the stance besides St. Giles's, when they hear the drone
of his pipes reascending from the bowels of the earth
below their horses' feet.
But it is not only pipers who have vanished, many a
solid bulk of masonry has been likewise spirited into the
air. Here, for example, is the shape of a heart let into
the causeway. This was the site of the Tolbooth, the
Heart of Midlothian, a place old in story and namefather
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from An Episode Under the Terror by Honore de Balzac: felt inclined to credit him with good intentions rather than bad.
Forgetting the fright that he had given the pastry-cook, she walked on
with a firmer step through the upper end of the Faubourg Saint Martin;
and another half-hour's walk brought her to a house at the corner
where the road to the Barriere de Pantin turns off from the main
thoroughfare. Even at this day, the place is one of the least
frequented parts of Paris. The north wind sweeps over the Buttes-
Chaumont and Belleville, and whistles through the houses (the hovels
rather), scattered over an almost uninhabited low-lying waste, where
the fences are heaps of earth and bones. It was a desolate-looking
place, a fitting refuge for despair and misery.
|
