| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from What is Man? by Mark Twain: for notoriety in one, for fame in another. It is this madness
for being noticed and talked about which has invented kingship
and the thousand other dignities, and tricked them out with
pretty and showy fineries; it has made kings pick one another's
pockets, scramble for one another's crowns and estates, slaughter
one another's subjects; it has raised up prize-fighters, and
poets, and villages mayors, and little and big politicians, and
big and little charity-founders, and bicycle champions, and
banditti chiefs, and frontier desperadoes, and Napoleons.
Anything to get notoriety; anything to set the village, or the
township, or the city, or the State, or the nation, or the planet
What is Man? |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Herbert West: Reanimator by H. P. Lovecraft: thought haunted us shadowingly, till finally West disappeared
under frightful circumstances. But at the time of the scream in
the cellar laboratory of the isolated Bolton cottage, our fears
were subordinate to our anxiety for extremely fresh specimens.
West was more avid than I, so that it almost seemed to me that
he looked half-covetously at any very healthy living physique.
It was in July, 1910, that the bad luck regarding specimens
began to turn. I had been on a long visit to my parents in Illinois,
and upon my return found West in a state of singular elation.
He had, he told me excitedly, in all likelihood solved the problem
of freshness through an approach from an entirely new angle --
Herbert West: Reanimator |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy: the most distant ridge. There was neither hedge nor tree in
the prospect now, the road clinging to the stubby expanse of
corn-land like a strip to an undulating garment. Near her
was a barn--the single building of any kind within her
horizon.
She strained her eyes up the lessening road, but nothing
appeared thereon--not so much as a speck. She sighed one
word--"Donald!" and turned her face to the town for retreat.
Here the case was different. A single figure was
approaching her--Elizabeth-Jane's.
Lucetta, in spite of her loneliness, seemed a little vexed.
The Mayor of Casterbridge |
