| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe: with the crowd.' She presently gave me my cue. 'Go, child,'
says she, 'to the house, and run in and tell the lady, or anybody
you see, that you come to help them, and that you came from
such a gentlewoman (that is, one of her acquaintance farther
up the street).' She gave me the like cue to the next house,
naming another name that was also an acquaintance of the
gentlewoman of the house.
Away I went, and, coming to the house, I found them all in
confusion, you may be sure. I ran in, and finding one of the
maids, 'Lord! sweetheart,' says I, 'how came this dismal
accident? Where is your mistress? Any how does she do?
Moll Flanders |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Second Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln: It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's
assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces;
but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both
could not be answered--that of neither has been answered fully.
The Almighty has his own purposes. "Woe unto the world because
of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe
to that man by whom the offense cometh." If we shall suppose
that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the
providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued
through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he
gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due
Second Inaugural Address |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Voyage Out by Virginia Woolf: deepened and enlarged the strangely small bright view of a girl.
In return for what he could tell her she brought him such curiosity
and sensitiveness of perception, that he was led to doubt
whether any gift bestowed by much reading and living was quite
the equal of that for pleasure and pain. What would experience
give her after all, except a kind of ridiculous formal balance,
like that of a drilled dog in the street? He looked at her face
and wondered how it would look in twenty years' time, when the eyes
had dulled, and the forehead wore those little persistent wrinkles
which seem to show that the middle-aged are facing something hard
which the young do not see? What would the hard thing be for them,
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