| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Jungle by Upton Sinclair: handling fourteen-pound cans all day.
It was a striking circumstance that Jonas, too, had gotten his job by the
misfortune of some other person. Jonas pushed a truck loaded with hams
from the smoke rooms on to an elevator, and thence to the packing rooms.
The trucks were all of iron, and heavy, and they put about threescore hams
on each of them, a load of more than a quarter of a ton. On the uneven
floor it was a task for a man to start one of these trucks, unless he was
a giant; and when it was once started he naturally tried his best to keep
it going. There was always the boss prowling about, and if there was a
second's delay he would fall to cursing; Lithuanians and Slovaks and such,
who could not understand what was said to them, the bosses were wont to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: that impressed her as vast and imposing--this prospective
patron proved a gentleman, a bachelor in the prime of life,
such a figure as had never risen, save in a dream or an old novel,
before a fluttered, anxious girl out of a Hampshire vicarage.
One could easily fix his type; it never, happily, dies out.
He was handsome and bold and pleasant, offhand and gay and kind.
He struck her, inevitably, as gallant and splendid,
but what took her most of all and gave her the courage she
afterward showed was that he put the whole thing to her as
a kind of favor, an obligation he should gratefully incur.
She conceived him as rich, but as fearfully extravagant--
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne: But my uncle rapidly recovered himself.
"Aha! will fate play tricks upon me? Will the elements lay plots
against me? Shall fire, air, and water make a combined attack against
me? Well, they shall know what a determined man can do. I will not
yield. I will not stir a single foot backwards, and it will be seen
whether man or nature is to have the upper hand!"
Erect upon the rock, angry and threatening, Otto Liedenbrock was a
rather grotesque fierce parody upon the fierce Achilles defying the
lightning. But I thought it my duty to interpose and attempt to lay
some restraint upon this unmeasured fanaticism.
"Just listen to me," I said firmly. "Ambition must have a limit
Journey to the Center of the Earth |
