| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce: fire at will. God help me, I cannot dodge them all!"
An appalling splash within two yards of him was followed by a
loud, rushing sound, DIMINUENDO, which seemed to travel back
through the air to the fort and died in an explosion which
stirred the very river to its deeps! A rising sheet of water
curved over him, fell down upon him, blinded him, strangled
him! The cannon had taken an hand in the game. As he shook
his head free from the commotion of the smitten water he
heard the deflected shot humming through the air ahead, and
in an instant it was cracking and smashing the branches in
the forest beyond.
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells: from their injury. They remain for the rest of life spiritually
crippled and debased, haunted by a fear, stained with a persuasion
of relentless cruelty in the ultimate cause of all things.
I, who write, was so set against God, thus rendered. He and his
Hell were the nightmare of my childhood; I hated him while I still
believed in him, and who could help but hate? I thought of him as a
fantastic monster, perpetually spying, perpetually listening,
perpetually waiting to condemn and to "strike me dead"; his flames
as ready as a grill-room fire. He was over me and about my
feebleness and silliness and forgetfulness as the sky and sea would
be about a child drowning in mid-Atlantic. When I was still only a
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Master and Man by Leo Tolstoy: surprised that in the other world peasants should be shouting
in the same old way and had the same kind of body, and then
when he realized that he was still in this world he was sorry
rather than glad, especially when he found that the toes on
both his feet were frozen.
Nikita lay in hospital for two months. They cut off three of
his toes, but the others recovered so that he was still able to
work and went on living for another twenty years, first as a
farm-labourer, then in his old age as a watchman. He died at
home as he had wished, only this year, under the icons with a
lighted taper in his hands. Before he died he asked his wife's
Master and Man |
