| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane: ing his belief in ultimate success, and bothering
little about means and roads. But here he was
confronted with a thing of moment. It had sud-
denly appeared to him that perhaps in a battle he
might run. He was forced to admit that as far as
war was concerned he knew nothing of himself.
A sufficient time before he would have allowed
the problem to kick its heels at the outer portals
of his mind, but now he felt compelled to give
serious attention to it.
A little panic-fear grew in his mind. As his
The Red Badge of Courage |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Divine Comedy (translated by H.F. Cary) by Dante Alighieri: Before the emeralds, whence love erewhile
Hath drawn his weapons on thee. "As they spake,
A thousand fervent wishes riveted
Mine eyes upon her beaming eyes, that stood
Still fix'd toward the Gryphon motionless.
As the sun strikes a mirror, even thus
Within those orbs the twofold being, shone,
For ever varying, in one figure now
Reflected, now in other. Reader! muse
How wond'rous in my sight it seem'd to mark
A thing, albeit steadfast in itself,
The Divine Comedy (translated by H.F. Cary) |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad: wind howling, royals set, and the ship rushing on in the dark, an
immense white sheet of foam level with the lee rail. Mr. P-, in
charge of the deck, hooked on to the windward mizzen rigging in a
state of perfect serenity; myself, the third mate, also hooked on
somewhere to windward of the slanting poop, in a state of the
utmost preparedness to jump at the very first hint of some sort of
order, but otherwise in a perfectly acquiescent state of mind.
Suddenly, out of the companion would appear a tall, dark figure,
bareheaded, with a short white beard of a perpendicular cut, very
visible in the dark - Captain S-, disturbed in his reading down
below by the frightful bounding and lurching of the ship. Leaning
The Mirror of the Sea |
