| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne: abyss into which we were being hurled by an irresistible torrent? Why
should we fear the horrors of famine, when death was swooping down
upon us in a multitude of other forms? Would there be time left to
die of starvation?
Yet by an inexplicable play of the imagination I forgot my present
dangers, to contemplate the threatening future. Was there any chance
of escaping from the fury of this impetuous torrent, and of returning
to the surface of the globe? I could not form the slightest
conjecture how or when. But one chance in a thousand, or ten
thousand, is still a chance; whilst death from starvation would leave
us not the smallest hope in the world.
Journey to the Center of the Earth |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Prince of Bohemia by Honore de Balzac: unrest impossible to analyze, still less to describe, yet not
incomprehensible; a something ready to break out if occasion calls
into flying upleaping flame? It is the /accidia/ of the cloister; a
trace of sourness, of ferment engendered by the enforced stagnation of
youthful energies, a vague, obscure melancholy."
"That will do," said the Marquise; "you are giving me a mental shower
bath."
"It is the early afternoon languor. If a man has nothing to do, he
will sooner get into mischief than do nothing at all; this invariably
happens in France. Youth at present day has two sides to it; the
studious or unappreciated, and the ardent or /passionne/."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates by Howard Pyle: hearth, sat down.
His dull little eyes never moved from his stepbrother's face.
There was no curiosity in his expression, no surprise, no wonder.
The heavy under lip dropped a little farther open and there was
snore than usual of dull, expressionless stupidity upon the
lumpish face; but that was all.
As was said, the face upon which he looked was strangely,
marvelously changed from what it had been when he had last seen
it nine years before, and, though it was still the face of Levi
West, it was a very different Levi West than the shiftless
ne'er-do-well who had run away to sea in the Brazilian brig that
Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates |
