| 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: - These United States furnish the greatest market for intellectual
GREEN FRUIT of all the places in the world. I think so, at any
rate. The demand for intellectual labor is so enormous and the
market so far from nice, that young talent is apt to fare like
unripe gooseberries, - get plucked to make a fool of. Think of a
country which buys eighty thousand copies of the "Proverbial
Philosophy," while the author's admiring countrymen have been
buying twelve thousand! How can one let his fruit hang in the sun
until it gets fully ripe, while there are eighty thousand such
hungry mouths ready to swallow it and proclaim its praises?
Consequently, there never was such a collection of crude pippins
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Bickerstaff-Partridge Papers by Jonathan Swift: the renowned Professor of Astronomy at Utrecht, seems to differ
from me in one article; but it is in a modest manner, that
becomes a philosopher; as, Pace tanti viri dixerim: And pag.55,
he seems to lay the error upon the printer (as indeed it ought)
and says, vel forsan error typographi, cum alioquin
Bickerstaffius ver doctissimus, etc.
If Mr. Partridge had followed this example in the controversy
between us, he might have spared me the trouble of justifying
myself in so publick a manner. I believe few men are readier to
own their errors than I, or more thankful to those who will
please to inform me of them. But it seems this gentleman, instead
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Call of the Wild by Jack London: To Buck it was boundless delight, this hunting, fishing, and
indefinite wandering through strange places. For weeks at a time
they would hold on steadily, day after day; and for weeks upon end
they would camp, here and there, the dogs loafing and the men
burning holes through frozen muck and gravel and washing countless
pans of dirt by the heat of the fire. Sometimes they went hungry,
sometimes they feasted riotously, all according to the abundance
of game and the fortune of hunting. Summer arrived, and dogs and
men packed on their backs, rafted across blue mountain lakes, and
descended or ascended unknown rivers in slender boats whipsawed
from the standing forest.
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