| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin: gales, Her Majesty's ship Beagle, a ten-gun
brig, under the command of Captain Fitz Roy, R. N.,
sailed from Devonport on the 27th of December, 1831. The
object of the expedition was to complete the survey of
Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, commenced under Captain King
in 1826 to 1830, -- to survey the shores of Chile, Peru, and
of some islands in the Pacific -- and to carry a chain of
chronometrical measurements round the World. On the 6th
of January we reached Teneriffe, but were prevented landing,
by fears of our bringing the cholera: the next morning
we saw the sun rise behind the rugged outline of the Grand
The Voyage of the Beagle |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Vailima Letters by Robert Louis Stevenson: proper tramp and rattle of the tropics. All this while I met
no sight or sound of man, except the voice which was now
silent, and a damned pig-fence that headed me off at every
corner. Do you know barbed wire? Think of a fence of it on
rotten posts, and you barefoot. But I crossed it at last
with my heart in my mouth and no harm done. Thence at last
to C's.: no C. Next place I came to was in the zone of
woods. They offered me a buggy and set a black boy to wash
my legs and feet. 'Washum legs belong that fellow white-man'
was the command. So at last I ran down my son of a gun in
the hotel, sober, and with no story to tell; penitent, I
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Burning Daylight by Jack London: joy and blood-stir that went with flying over hard surface. Now
one man to the fore in the snowshoes, and now the other, it was a
case of stubborn, unmitigated plod. A yard of powdery snow had
to be pressed down, and the wide-webbed shoe, under a man's
weight, sank a full dozen inches into the soft surface. Snowshoe
work, under such conditions, called for the use of muscles other
than those used in ordinary walking. From step to step the
rising foot could not come up and forward on a slant. It had to
be raised perpendicularly. When the snowshoe was pressed into
the snow, its nose was confronted by a vertical wall of snow
twelve inches high. If the foot, in rising, slanted forward the
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