| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Rescue by Joseph Conrad: Captain! Where's your show of cutthroats? Why! This sea is as
empty as a church on a week-day."
The booming report, nearly over his head, of the brig's
eighteen-pounder interrupted him. A round puff of white vapour,
spreading itself lazily, clung in fading shreds about the
foreyard. Lingard, turning half round in the stern sheets, looked
at the smoke on the shore. Carter remained silent, staring
sleepily at the yacht they were approaching. Lingard kept
watching the smoke so intensely that he almost forgot where he
was, till Carter's voice pronouncing sharply at his ear the words
"way enough," recalled him to himself.
The Rescue |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Democracy In America, Volume 2 by Alexis de Toqueville: acted upon by the same wants and affected by them in the same
manner. The men of whom it is composed naturally derive from
their superior and hereditary position a taste for what is
extremely well made and lasting. This affects the general way of
thinking of the nation in relation to the arts. It often occurs,
among such a people, that even the peasant will rather go without
the object he covets, than procure it in a state of imperfection.
In aristocracies, then, the handicraftsmen work for only a
limited number of very fastidious customers: the profit they hope
to make depends principally on the perfection of their
workmanship.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tales of the Klondyke by Jack London: gleaming teeth and cruel snout surmounting his head. No other
word was spoken. The prospectors held the peace. Sipsu arose and
slipped into her snowshoes.
"Good-by, O my man," she said to Hitchcock. But the man who had
sat beside her on the sled gave no sign, nor lifted his head as
they filed away into the white forest.
Unlike many men, his faculty of adaptation, while large, had never
suggested the expediency of an alliance with the women of the
Northland. His broad cosmopolitanism had never impelled toward
covenanting in marriage with the daughters of the soil. If it
had, his philosophy of life would not have stood between. But it
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