| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Chita: A Memory of Last Island by Lafcadio Hearn: pleasing, full of quaverings and long plaintive notes, like the
call of the cranes ... Tou', tou' pays blanc! ... Afterward
Camaniere had leased the place;--everything must have been
changed; even the songs could not be the same. Tou', tou' pays
blare!--Danie qui commande ...
And then Paris; and the university, with its wild
under-life,--some debts, some follies; and the frequent fond
letters from home to which he might have replied so much
oftener;--Paris, where talent is mediocrity; Paris, with its
thunders and its splendors and its seething of passion;--Paris,
supreme focus of human endeavor, with its madnesses of art, its
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Time Machine by H. G. Wells: profound chemical reaction--possibly a far-reaching explosion
--would result, and blow myself and my apparatus out of all
possible dimensions--into the Unknown. This possibility had
occurred to me again and again while I was making the machine;
but then I had cheerfully accepted it as an unavoidable risk--
one of the risks a man has got to take! Now the risk was
inevitable, I no longer saw it in the same cheerful light. The
fact is that insensibly, the absolute strangeness of everything,
the sickly jarring and swaying of the machine, above all, the
feeling of prolonged falling, had absolutely upset my nerve. I
told myself that I could never stop, and with a gust of petulance
The Time Machine |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Laches by Plato: ridicule, seeming to think that this, or any other military question, may
be settled by asking, 'What do the Lacedaemonians say?' The one is the
thoughtful general, willing to avail himself of any discovery in the art of
war (Aristoph. Aves); the other is the practical man, who relies on his own
experience, and is the enemy of innovation; he can act but cannot speak,
and is apt to lose his temper. It is to be noted that one of them is
supposed to be a hearer of Socrates; the other is only acquainted with his
actions. Laches is the admirer of the Dorian mode; and into his mouth the
remark is put that there are some persons who, having never been taught,
are better than those who have. Like a novice in the art of disputation,
he is delighted with the hits of Socrates; and is disposed to be angry with
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