| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Man against the Sky by Edwin Arlington Robinson: The churning out of all those blood-fed lines,
The nights of many schemes and little sleep,
The full brain hammered hot with too much thinking,
The vexed heart over-worn with too much aching, --
This weary jangling of conjoined affairs
Made out of elements that have no end,
And all confused at once, I understand,
Is not what makes a man to live forever.
O no, not now! He'll not be going now:
There'll be time yet for God knows what explosions
Before he goes. He'll stay awhile. Just wait:
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Don Quixote by Miquel de Cervantes: chivalry romances that is the subject of the burlesque. Enchantments
of the sort travestied in those of Dulcinea and the Trifaldi and the
cave of Montesinos play a leading part in the later and inferior
romances, and another distinguishing feature is caricatured in Don
Quixote's blind adoration of Dulcinea. In the romances of chivalry
love is either a mere animalism or a fantastic idolatry. Only a
coarse-minded man would care to make merry with the former, but to one
of Cervantes' humour the latter was naturally an attractive subject
for ridicule. Like everything else in these romances, it is a gross
exaggeration of the real sentiment of chivalry, but its peculiar
extravagance is probably due to the influence of those masters of
Don Quixote |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Twelve Stories and a Dream by H. G. Wells: forth his head beside the gentleman's legs, coughing if necessary
to attract his attention, and then, smiling, apologising and explaining
his unfortunate intrusion by a few well-chosen sentences. But he
found these sentences hard to choose. "No doubt, sir, my appearance
is peculiar," or, "I trust, sir, you will pardon my somewhat ambiguous
appearance from beneath you," was about as much as he could get.
Grave possibilities forced themselves on his attention. Suppose
they did not believe him, what would they do to him? Would his
unblemished high character count for nothing? Technically he was
a burglar, beyond dispute. Following out this train of thought,
he was composing a lucid apology for "this technical crime I have
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