| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne: ebony trees of a beautiful black, crossed with capricious veins.
From time to time, in certain places where the landing was easy, the
canoe was stopped, when Gideon Spilett, Herbert, and Pencroft, their guns
in their hands, and preceded by Top, jumped on shore. Without expecting
game, some useful plant might be met with, and the young naturalist was
delighted with discovering a sort of wild spinach, belonging to the order
of chenopodiaceae, and numerous specimens of cruciferae, belonging to the
cabbage tribe, which it would certainly be possible to cultivate by
transplanting. There were cresses, horseradish, turnips, and lastly, little
branching hairy stalks, scarcely more than three feet high, which produced
brownish grains.
The Mysterious Island |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis: youngest and milkiest of the young men, and he himself desired to hold Carrie
Nork's pulpy hand, and dropped it only because Tanis looked angry.
When he went home, at two, he was fully a member of the Bunch, and all the
week thereafter he was bound by the exceedingly straitened conventions, the
exceedingly wearing demands, of their life of pleasure and freedom. He had to
go to their parties; he was involved in the agitation when everybody
telephoned to everybody else that she hadn't meant what she'd said when she'd
said that, and anyway, why was Pete going around saying she'd said it?
Never was a Family more insistent on learning one another's movements than
were the Bunch. All of them volubly knew, or indignantly desired to know,
where all the others had been every minute of the week. Babbitt found himself
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad: established, her fame made for her, the tale of her qualities and
of her defects kept, her idiosyncrasies commented upon with the
zest of personal gossip, her achievements made much of, her faults
glossed over as things that, being without remedy in our imperfect
world, should not be dwelt upon too much by men who, with the help
of ships, wrest out a bitter living from the rough grasp of the
sea. All that talk makes up her "name," which is handed over from
one crew to another without bitterness, without animosity, with the
indulgence of mutual dependence, and with the feeling of close
association in the exercise of her perfections and in the danger of
her defects.
The Mirror of the Sea |
