| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: Another lantern came along. A bantering voice called out:
`Hello, are you Mr. Burden's folks? If you are, it's me you're looking for.
I'm Otto Fuchs. I'm Mr. Burden's hired man, and I'm to drive you out.
Hello, Jimmy, ain't you scared to come so far west?'
I looked up with interest at the new face in the lantern-light.
He might have stepped out of the pages of `Jesse James.'
He wore a sombrero hat, with a wide leather band and a bright buckle,
and the ends of his moustache were twisted up stiffly,
like little horns. He looked lively and ferocious, I thought,
and as if he had a history. A long scar ran across one cheek
and drew the corner of his mouth up in a sinister curl.
My Antonia |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: till they heard farther. In the next place, seeing the savages
were all come on shore, and that they had bent their course
directly that way, they opened the fences where the milch cows were
kept, and drove them all out; leaving their goats to straggle in
the woods, whither they pleased, that the savages might think they
were all bred wild; but the rogue who came with them was too
cunning for that, and gave them an account of it all, for they went
directly to the place.
When the two poor frightened men had secured their wives and goods,
they sent the other slave they had of the three who came with the
women, and who was at their place by accident, away to the
Robinson Crusoe |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Facino Cane by Honore de Balzac: morrow, and spent the money in a score of different ways. Then came
domestic details, lamentations over the excessive dearness of
potatoes, or the length of the winter and the high price of block
fuel, together with forcible representations of amounts owing to the
baker, ending in an acrimonious dispute, in the course of which such
couples reveal their characters in picturesque language. As I
listened, I could make their lives mine, I felt their rags on my back,
I walked with their gaping shoes on my feet; their cravings, their
needs, had all passed into my soul, or my soul had passed into theirs.
It was the dream of a waking man. I waxed hot with them over the
foreman's tyranny, or the bad customers that made them call again and
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