| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass: Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms
of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of
American slave-buyers. See this drove sold and separated
forever; and never forget the deep, sad sobs that arose from that
scattered multitude. Tell me, citizens, where, under the sun,
can you witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. Yet this
is but a glance at the American slave trade, as it exists at this
moment, in the ruling part of the United States.
I was born amid such sights and scenes. To me the American slave
trade is a terrible reality. When a child, my soul was often
pierced with a sense of its horrors. I lived on Philpot street,
My Bondage and My Freedom |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Crisis in Russia by Arthur Ransome: be still engaged in augmenting the dinners of their members
at the expense of the dinners of the capitalists which, in the
long run (if that were possible) they would abolish. If, on
the other hand, one believes that social revolution has
actually occurred, to speak of Trades Unions continuing the
struggle in which they conquered something like three years
ago, is to urge them to a sterile fanaticism which has been
neatly described by Professor Santayana as a redoubling of
your effort when you have forgotten your aim.
It 's probably true that the "aim" of the Trades Unions
was more clearly defined in Russia than elsewhere. In
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from One Basket by Edna Ferber: wreck of the buggy bumping the road behind them. He had stolen
the horses out of the barn after the help was asleep, had led
them stealthily down the road, and then had whirled off to a
rendezvous of his own in town. The fall from the buggy might not
have hurt him, but evidently he had been dragged almost a mile
before his battered body became somehow disentangled from the
splintered wood and the reins.
That horror might have served to bring Ben Westerveld and his
wife together, but it did not. It only increased her bitterness
and her hatred of the locality and the life.
"I hope you're good an' satisfied now," she repeated in endless
One Basket |
