| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Footnote to History by Robert Louis Stevenson: arrival; when a silly lad, in mere lightness of heart, fired a shot
in the air. My native friend, Mrs. Mary Hamilton, ran out of her
house and gave the culprit a good shaking: an episode in the midst
of battle as incongruous as the grazing cow. But his sillier
comrades followed his example; a harmless volley warned the boats
what they might expect; and they drew back and passed outside the
reef for the passage of the Fuisa. Here they came under the fire
of the right wing of the Mataafas on the river-bank. The beach,
raked east and west, appeared to them no place to land on. And
they hung off in the deep water of the lagoon inside the barrier
reef, feebly fusillading the pilot house.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Odyssey by Homer: "She at once called her husband Antiphates from the place of
assembly, and forthwith he set about killing my men. He snatched
up one of them, and began to make his dinner off him then and
there, whereon the other two ran back to the ships as fast as
ever they could. But Antiphates raised a hue-and-cry after them,
and thousands of sturdy Laestrygonians sprang up from every
quarter--ogres, not men. They threw vast rocks at us from the
cliffs as though they had been mere stones, and I heard the
horrid sound of the ships crunching up against one another, and
the death cries of my men, as the Laestrygonians speared them
like fishes and took them home to eat them. While they were thus
The Odyssey |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Economist by Xenophon: sitting idle in the market-place.
[1] "The god of freedom, or of freed men." See Plat. "Theag." 259 A.
The scholiast on Aristoph. "Plutus" 1176 identifies the god with
Zeus Soter. See Plut. "Dem." 859 (Clough, v. 30).
Nor would you see me now so sitting, Socrates (he answered), but that
I promised to meet some strangers, friends of mine,[2] at this place.
[2] "Foreign friends."
And when you have no such business on hand (I said) where in heaven's
name do you spend your time and how do you employ yourself? I will not
conceal from you how anxious I am to learn from your lips by what
conduct you have earned for yourself the title "beautiful and
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