| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Moran of the Lady Letty by Frank Norris: make out a sail some eight miles off the starboard bow. Even at
that distance, and to eyes so inexperienced as those of Wilbur, it
needed but a glance to know that something was wrong with her. It
was not that she failed to ride the waves with even keel, it was
not that her rigging was in disarray, nor that her sails were
disordered. Her distance was too great to make out such details.
But in precisely the same manner as a trained physician glances at
a doomed patient, and from that indefinable look in the face of
him and the eyes of him pronounces the verdict "death," so
Kitchell took in the stranger with a single comprehensive glance,
and exclaimed:
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The King of the Golden River by John Ruskin: at an imprudent rate of walking, which greatly exhausted him before
he had scaled the first range of the green and low hills. He was,
moreover, surprised, on surmounting them, to find that a large
glacier, of whose existence, notwithstanding his previous knowledge
of the mountains, he had been absolutely ignorant, lay between him
and the source of the Golden River. He entered on it with the
boldness of a practiced mountaineer, yet he thought he had never
traversed so strange or so dangerous a glacier in his life. The ice
was excessively slippery, and out of all its chasms came wild sounds
of gushing water--not monotonous or low, but changeful and loud,
rising occasionally into drifting passages of wild melody, then
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: take all color out of storybooks and fairytales.
Wasn't it just a storybook over which I had fallen adoze
and adream? No; it was a big, ugly, antique, but convenient house,
embodying a few features of a building still older, half-replaced and
half-utilized, in which I had the fancy of our being almost
as lost as a handful of passengers in a great drifting ship.
Well, I was, strangely, at the helm!
II
This came home to me when, two days later, I drove over
with Flora to meet, as Mrs. Grose said, the little gentleman;
and all the more for an incident that, presenting itself
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