| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Human Drift by Jack London: some one else to coil over a pin. I was always eager for the run
aloft for the shifting of topsail sheets and tacks, or for the
setting or taking in of topsails; and in these matters I did more
than my share.
Furthermore, I was on a hair-trigger of resentment myself. I knew
better than to accept any abuse or the slightest patronizing. At
the first hint of such, I went off-- I exploded. I might be
beaten in the subsequent fight, but I left the impression that I
was a wild-cat and that I would just as willingly fight again. My
intention was to demonstrate that I would tolerate no imposition.
I proved that the man who imposed on me must have a fight on his
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: frames.
"Has he chucked his pictures too? I haven't seen a single one in
the house."
A slight shade of constraint crossed Mrs. Gisburn's open
countenance. "It's his ridiculous modesty, you know. He says
they're not fit to have about; he's sent them all away except
one--my portrait--and that I have to keep upstairs."
His ridiculous modesty--Jack's modesty about his pictures? My
curiosity was growing like the bean-stalk. I said persuasively
to my hostess: "I must really see your portrait, you know."
She glanced out almost timorously at the terrace where her
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: speaker, but to the essential impersonality of his mind, embodied
now in the very character of the words he uses. A Japanese noun is
a crystallized concept, handed down unchanged from the childhood of
the Japanese race. So primitive a conception does it represent that
it is neither a total nor a partial symbol, but rather the outcome
of a first vague generality. The word "man," for instance, means to
them not one man, still less mankind, but that indefinite idea which
struggles for embodiment in the utterance of the infant.
It represents not a person, but a thing, a material fact quite
innocent of gender. This early state of semi-consciousness the
Japanese never outgrew. The world continued to present itself to
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