| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: followed by a peal of laughter from the cars. They were speaking
English all about me, but I knew I was in a foreign land.
Twenty minutes before nine that night, we were deposited at the
Pacific Transfer Station near Council Bluffs, on the eastern bank
of the Missouri river. Here we were to stay the night at a kind of
caravanserai, set apart for emigrants. But I gave way to a thirst
for luxury, separated myself from my companions, and marched with
my effects into the Union Pacific Hotel. A white clerk and a
coloured gentleman whom, in my plain European way, I should call
the boots, were installed behind a counter like bank tellers. They
took my name, assigned me a number, and proceeded to deal with my
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll: The crew was complete: it included a Boots--
A maker of Bonnets and Hoods--
A Barrister, brought to arrange their disputes--
And a Broker, to value their goods.
A Billiard-maker, whose skill was immense,
Might perhaps have won more than his share--
But a Banker, engaged at enormous expense,
Had the whole of their cash in his care.
There was also a Beaver, that paced on the deck,
Or would sit making lace in the bow:
And had often (the Bellman said) saved them from wreck,
The Hunting of the Snark |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Door in the Wall, et. al. by H. G. Wells: high, roaring hungrily, upon the long coasts of Asia, and swept
inland across the plains of China. For a space the star, hotter
now and larger and brighter than the sun in its strength, showed
with pitiless brilliance the wide and populous country; towns and
villages with their pagodas and trees, roads, wide cultivated
fields, millions of sleepless people staring in helpless terror at
the incandescent sky; and then, low and growing, came the murmur of
the flood. And thus it was with millions of men that night--a
flight nowhither, with limbs heavy with heat and breath fierce and
scant, and the flood like a wall swift and white behind. And then
death.
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