| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Bureaucracy by Honore de Balzac: Thus it was that this woman who believed herself destined to shine in
the world was condemned to use her mind and her faculties in a sordid
struggle, fighting hand to hand with an account-book. Already,
terrible sacrifice of pride! she had dismissed her man-servant, not
long after the death of her father. Most women grow weary of this
daily struggle; they complain but they usually end by giving up to
fate and taking what comes to them; Celestine's ambition, far from
lessening, only increased through difficulties, and led her, when she
found she could not conquer them, to sweep them aside. To her mind
this complicated tangle of the affairs of life was a Gordian knot
impossible to untie and which genius ought to cut. Far from accepting
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Footnote to History by Robert Louis Stevenson: the warships, with generous vagueness, the boundaries of
problematical estates. Ten days later, the beach of Saluafata bay
fluttered (as I have told in the last chapter) with the flag of
Germany. The Americans riposted with a claim to Tamasese's camp,
some small part of which (says Knappe) did really belong to "an
American nigger." The disease spread, the flags were multiplied,
the operations of war became an egg-dance among miniature neutral
territories; and though all men took a hand in these proceedings,
all men in turn were struck with their absurdity. Mullan, Leary's
successor, warned Knappe, in an emphatic despatch, not to squander
and discredit the solemnity of that emblem which was all he had to
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates by Howard Pyle: bullets were presently added to the din of cannonading.
In two minutes more it would have been aboard of them, when in a
moment Captain Morgan roared out of a sudden to the man at the
helm to put it hard a starboard. In response the man ran the
wheel over with the utmost quickness, and the galleon, obeying
her helm very readily, came around upon a course which, if
continued, would certainly bring them into collision with their
enemy.
It is possible at first the Spaniards imagined the pirates
intended to escape past their stern, for they instantly began
backing oars to keep them from getting past, so that the water
Howard Pyle's Book of Pirates |
