| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Just Folks by Edgar A. Guest: A liner came his way;
Dad tried to stop it with his knee,
And missed a double play.
He threw into the bleachers twice,
He let a pop fly fall;
Oh, we were all ashamed of him,
When father played baseball.
He tried to run, but tripped and fell,
He tried to take a throw;
It put three fingers out of joint,
And father let it go.
Just Folks |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: comrades, they kept close all that day and the next, going out only
at night to make their observation: but they had the good luck to
be undiscovered, for wherever the savages went, they did not land
that time on the island, but pursued some other design.
CHAPTER IV - RENEWED INVASION OF SAVAGES
AND now they had another broil with the three Englishmen; one of
whom, a most turbulent fellow, being in a rage at one of the three
captive slaves, because the fellow had not done something right
which he bade him do, and seemed a little untractable in his
showing him, drew a hatchet out of a frog-belt which he wore by his
side, and fell upon the poor savage, not to correct him, but to
Robinson Crusoe |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Personal Record by Joseph Conrad: the firmament of stars, whose infinite numbers and awful
distances may move us to laughter or tears (was it the Walrus or
the Carpenter, in the poem, who "wept to see such quantities of
sand"?), or, again, to a properly steeled heart, may matter
nothing at all.
The casual quotation, which had suggested itself out of a poem
full of merit, leads me to remark that in the conception of a
purely spectacular universe, where inspiration of every sort has
a rational existence, the artist of every kind finds a natural
place; and among them the poet as the seer par excellence. Even
the writer of prose, who in his less noble and more toilsome task
A Personal Record |
