| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Youth by Joseph Conrad: house on deck is gone. Leave this, and let's look for the
cook.'
"There was a deck-house forward, which contained
the galley, the cook's berth, and the quarters of the
crew. As we had expected for days to see it swept away,
the hands had been ordered to sleep in the cabin--the
only safe place in the ship. The steward, Abraham,
however, persisted in clinging to his berth, stupidly, like
a mule--from sheer fright I believe, like an animal that
on't leave a stable falling in an earthquake. So we
went to look for him. It was chancing death, since once
Youth |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain: all this long journey, and after all we'd done for them
scoundrels, here it was all come to nothing, everything
all busted up and ruined, because they could have the
heart to serve Jim such a trick as that, and make him
a slave again all his life, and amongst strangers, too,
for forty dirty dollars.
Once I said to myself it would be a thousand times
better for Jim to be a slave at home where his family
was, as long as he'd GOT to be a slave, and so I'd better
write a letter to Tom Sawyer and tell him to tell Miss
Watson where he was. But I soon give up that notion
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne: borne in that profound darkness through the infinity of space?
How could they learn, how calculate, in the midst of this night?
All these questions made Barbicane uneasy, but he could not
solve them.
Certainly, the invisible orb was _there_, perhaps only some few
miles off; but neither he nor his companions could see it.
If there was any noise on its surface, they could not hear it.
Air, that medium of sound, was wanting to transmit the groanings
of that moon which the Arabic legends call "a man already half
granite, and still breathing."
One must allow that that was enough to aggravate the most
From the Earth to the Moon |
