| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift: Catholick countries about nine months after Lent, the markets
will be more glutted than usual, because the number of Popish
infants, is at least three to one in this kingdom, and therefore
it will have one other collateral advantage, by lessening the
number of Papists among us.
I have already computed the charge of nursing a beggar's child
(in which list I reckon all cottagers, labourers, and four-fifths
of the farmers) to be about two shillings per annum, rags
included; and I believe no gentleman would repine to give ten
shillings for the carcass of a good fat child, which, as I have
said, will make four dishes of excellent nutritive meat, when he
A Modest Proposal |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Jungle by Upton Sinclair: all the days of his life. His old love, which had been starved
to death, beaten to death, awoke in him again; the floodgates of
memory were lifted--he saw all their life together, saw her as he
had seen her in Lithuania, the first day at the fair, beautiful as
the flowers, singing like a bird. He saw her as he had married her,
with all her tenderness, with her heart of wonder; the very words
she had spoken seemed to ring now in his ears, the tears she had shed
to be wet upon his cheek. The long, cruel battle with misery and
hunger had hardened and embittered him, but it had not changed her--
she had been the same hungry soul to the end, stretching out her arms
to him, pleading with him, begging him for love and tenderness.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Catriona by Robert Louis Stevenson: towards the Cameronian extremes. His morals were of a more doubtful
colour. I found he was deep in the free trade, and used the rains of
Tantallon for a magazine of smuggled merchandise. As for a gauger, I
do not believe he valued the life of one at half-a-farthing. But that
part of the coast of Lothian is to this day as wild a place, and the
commons there as rough a crew, as any in Scotland.
One incident of my imprisonment is made memorable by a consequence it
had long after. There was a warship at this time stationed in the
Firth, the SEAHORSE, Captain Palliser. It chanced she was cruising in
the month of September, plying between Fife and Lothian, and sounding
for sunk dangers. Early one fine morning she was seen about two miles
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