| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells: It had occurred towards midnight of the twelfth; and the
spectroscope, to which he had at once resorted, indicated a
mass of flaming gas, chiefly hydrogen, moving with an
enormous velocity towards this earth. This jet of fire had
become invisible about a quarter past twelve. He compared
it to a colossal puff of flame suddenly and violently squirted
out of the planet, "as flaming gases rushed out of a gun."
A singularly appropriate phrase it proved. Yet the next day
there was nothing of this in the papers except a little note in
the DAILY TELEGRAPH, and the world went in ignorance of one
of the gravest dangers that ever threatened the human race.
War of the Worlds |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) by Dante Alighieri: Such I became, and such, as far as cleaves
The rock to give a way to him who mounts,
Went on to where the circling doth begin.
On the fifth circle when I had come forth,
People I saw upon it who were weeping,
Stretched prone upon the ground, all downward turned.
"Adhaesit pavimento anima mea,"
I heard them say with sighings so profound,
That hardly could the words be understood.
"O ye elect of God, whose sufferings
Justice and Hope both render less severe,
The Divine Comedy (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow) |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Crisis in Russia by Arthur Ransome: was protecting the workers against it. If, on the other hand,
they believe that there has been a social revolution, so that
the class organized in Trades Unions is now, identical with
the governing, class (of employers, etc.) against which the
unions once struggled, then they must regard the present
position as a natural and satisfactory result of victory.
When I was in Moscow in the spring of this year the Russian
Trades Unions received a telegram from the Trades Union
Congress at Amsterdam, a telegram which admirably
illustrated the impossibility of separating judgment of the
present position of the Unions from judgments of the
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