| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom by William and Ellen Craft: lieve, all the slave States, are legislating in the same
manner. Thus the slaveholders make it almost im-
possible for free persons of colour to get out of the
slave States, in order that they may sell them into
slavery if they don't go. If no white persons travelled
upon railroads except those who could get some one
to vouch for their character in a penal bond of one
thousand dollars, the railroad companies would soon
go to the "wall." Such mean legislation is too low
for comment; therefore I leave the villainous acts to
speak for themselves.
Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Youth by Joseph Conrad: quiet, but off his balance evidently. Would you believe
it? He wanted to take a length of old stream-cable and
a kedge-anchor with him in the long-boat. We said,
'Ay, ay, sir,' deferentially, and on the quiet let the
thing slip overboard. The heavy medicine-chest went
that way, two bags of green coffee, tins of paint--fancy,
paint!--a whole lot of things. Then I was ordered with
two hands into the boats to make a stowage and get them
ready against the time it would be proper for us to leave
the ship.
"We put everything straight, stepped the long-boat's
Youth |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Alcibiades I by Plato: SOCRATES: And when did you discover them--not, surely, at the time when
you thought that you knew them?
ALCIBIADES: Certainly not.
SOCRATES: And when did you think that you were ignorant--if you consider,
you will find that there never was such a time?
ALCIBIADES: Really, Socrates, I cannot say.
SOCRATES: Then you did not learn them by discovering them?
ALCIBIADES: Clearly not.
SOCRATES: But just before you said that you did not know them by learning;
now, if you have neither discovered nor learned them, how and whence do you
come to know them?
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