| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War by Frederick A. Talbot: complete a given journey in dense fog just as easily as in clear
weather. It is the action of the cross currents and the
unconscious drift which render movement in the air during fog as
impracticable with safety as manoeuvring through the water under
similar conditions. More than one bold and skilful aviator has
essayed the crossing of the English Channel and, being overtaken
by fog, has failed to make the opposite coast. His compass has
given him the proper direction, but the side-drift has proved his
undoing, with the result that he has missed his objective.
The fickle character of the winds over the water, especially over
such expanses as the North Sea, constitutes another and seriously
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Symposium by Plato: another's arms. Then Zeus invented an adjustment of the sexes, which
enabled them to marry and go their way to the business of life. Now the
characters of men differ accordingly as they are derived from the original
man or the original woman, or the original man-woman. Those who come from
the man-woman are lascivious and adulterous; those who come from the woman
form female attachments; those who are a section of the male follow the
male and embrace him, and in him all their desires centre. The pair are
inseparable and live together in pure and manly affection; yet they cannot
tell what they want of one another. But if Hephaestus were to come to them
with his instruments and propose that they should be melted into one and
remain one here and hereafter, they would acknowledge that this was the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Within the Tides by Joseph Conrad: dollar-collecting trip. He added, laughing, that his wife was
making rather a fuss about it. She had begged him to stay ashore
and get somebody else to take his place for a voyage. She thought
there was some danger on account of the dollars. He told her, he
said, that there were no Java-sea pirates nowadays except in boys'
books. He had laughed at her fears, but he was very sorry, too;
for when she took any notion in her head it was impossible to argue
her out of it. She would be worrying herself all the time he was
away. Well, he couldn't help it. There was no one ashore fit to
take his place for the trip.
"This friend of mine and I went home together in the same mail-
 Within the Tides |