| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Walking by Henry David Thoreau: follow. He had no better implement with which to intrench himself
in the land than a clam-shell. But the farmer is armed with plow
and spade.
In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is
but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and
wild thinking in Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the scriptures and
mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us. As the
wild duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the
wild--the mallard--thought, which 'mid falling dews wings its way
above the fens. A truly good book is something as natural, and as
unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower
Walking |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Aspern Papers by Henry James: She had been very fair, she had had a wonderful complexion.
She was silent a little after I had ceased speaking; then she inquired,
"If you are so fond of a garden why don't you go to terra firma,
where there are so many far better than this?"
"Oh, it's the combination!" I answered, smiling; and then,
with rather a flight of fancy, "It's the idea of a garden
in the middle of the sea."
"It's not in the middle of the sea; you can't see the water."
I stared a moment, wondering whether she wished to convict me of fraud.
"Can't see the water? Why, dear madam, I can come up to the very gate
in my boat."
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson: ruefully from his clean chair to my muddy rags. "And now," says
he, "if you have any business, pray be brief and come swiftly to
the point. Nec gemino bellum Trojanum orditur ab ovo --do you
understand that?" says he, with a keen look.
"I will even do as Horace says, sir," I answered, smiling, "and
carry you in medias res." He nodded as if he was well pleased,
and indeed his scrap of Latin had been set to test me. For all
that, and though I was somewhat encouraged, the blood came in my
face when I added: "I have reason to believe myself some rights
on the estate of Shaws."
He got a paper book out of a drawer and set it before him open.
Kidnapped |
