| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: three cut-offs to the northernmost, you go only seventy miles.
To do the same thing a hundred and seventy-six years ago, one had
to go a hundred and fifty-eight miles!--shortening of eighty-eight
miles in that trifling distance. At some forgotten time in the past,
cut-offs were made above Vidalia, Louisiana; at island 92; at island 84;
and at Hale's Point. These shortened the river, in the aggregate,
seventy-seven miles.
Since my own day on the Mississippi, cut-offs have been made at
Hurricane Island; at island 100; at Napoleon, Arkansas; at Walnut Bend;
and at Council Bend. These shortened the river, in the aggregate,
sixty-seven miles. In my own time a cut-off was made at American Bend,
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: morning fog had thickened considerably. Everything round us
dripped--the derricks, the rails, every single rope in the
ship--as if a fit of crying had come upon the universe.
Almayer again raised his head and, in the accents of a man
accustomed to the buffets of evil fortune, asked, hardly audibly:
"I suppose you haven't got such a thing as a pony on board?"
I told him, almost in a whisper, for he attuned my communications
to his minor key, that we had such a thing as a pony, and I
hinted, as gently as I could, that he was confoundedly in the
way, too. I was very anxious to have him landed before I began
to handle the cargo. Almayer remained looking up at me for a
A Personal Record |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Apology by Plato: sophistry, which are the stock-accusations against all philosophers when
there is nothing else to be said of them.
The second accusation he meets by interrogating Meletus, who is present and
can be interrogated. 'If he is the corrupter, who is the improver of the
citizens?' (Compare Meno.) 'All men everywhere.' But how absurd, how
contrary to analogy is this! How inconceivable too, that he should make
the citizens worse when he has to live with them. This surely cannot be
intentional; and if unintentional, he ought to have been instructed by
Meletus, and not accused in the court.
But there is another part of the indictment which says that he teaches men
not to receive the gods whom the city receives, and has other new gods.
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