| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Tono Bungay by H. G. Wells: where one meant to hurt from ordered pugilism, practising both
arts, and having, moreover, precocious linguistic gifts. Our
cricket-field was bald about the wickets, and we played without
style and disputed with the umpire; and the teaching was chiefly
in the hands of a lout of nineteen, who wore ready-made clothes
and taught despicably. The head-master and proprietor taught us
arithmetic, algebra, and Euclid, and to the older boys even
trigonometry, himself; he had a strong mathematical bias, and I
think now that by the standard of a British public school he did
rather well by us.
We had one inestimable privilege at that school, and that was
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Desert Gold by Zane Grey: hold his seat.
The giant cactus came to be only so in name. These saguaros were
thinning out, growing stunted, and most of them were single columns.
Gradually other cactus forms showed a harder struggle for existence,
and the spaces of sand between were wider. But now the dreaded,
glistening choya began to show pale and gray and white upon the
rising slope. Round-topped hills, sunset-colored above, blue-black
below, intervened to hide the distant spurs and peaks. Mile and
mile long tongues of red lava streamed out between the hills and
wound down to stop abruptly upon the slope.
The fugitives were entering a desolate, burned-out world. It rose
Desert Gold |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Falk by Joseph Conrad: Realising the situation as though he had eyes in his
shoulder-blades, he joined us with a leap and took
the lead. The Chinaman fled silent like a rapid
shadow on the dust of an extremely oriental road.
I followed. A long way in the rear my mate
whooped like a savage. A young moon threw a
bashful light on a plain like a monstrous waste
ground: the architectural mass of a Buddhist tem-
ple far away projected itself in dead black on the
sky. We lost the thief of course; but in my disap-
pointment I had to admire Hermann's presence of
Falk |
