| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce: III
As Peyton Fahrquhar fell straight downward through the
bridge he lost consciousness and was as one already dead.
From this state he was awakened -- ages later, it seemed to
him -- by the pain of a sharp pressure upon his throat,
followed by a sense of suffocation. Keen, poignant agonies
seemed to shoot from his neck downward through every fiber of
his body and limbs. These pains appeared to flash along well
defined lines of ramification and to beat with an
inconceivably rapid periodicity. They seemed like streams of
pulsating fire heating him to an intolerable temperature. As
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: great army, in company with the General, cheered everywhere by
the loving greetings of the soldiers. He had met Sherman when
that commander hurried up fresh from his victorious march from
Atlanta; and after Grant had started on his final pursuit of Lee
the President still lingered. It was at City Point that the news
came to him of the fall of Richmond.
Between the receipt of this news and the following forenoon,
before any information of the great fire had reached them, a
visit to the rebel capital was arranged for the President and
Rear Admiral Porter. Ample precautions for their safety were
taken at the start. The President went in his own steamer, the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Psychology of Revolution by Gustave le Bon: their anonymity. We know that during the Commune of 1871 a few
anonymous orders sufficed to effect the burning of the finest
monuments of Paris: the Hotel de Ville, the Tuileries, the
Cour des Comptes, the buildings of the Legion of Honour, &c. A
brief order from the anonymous committees, ``Burn Finances, burn
Tuileries,'' &c., was immediately executed. An unlooked-for
chance only saved the Louvre and its collections. We know too
what religious attention is in our days accorded to the most
absurd injunctions of the anonymous leaders of the trades unions.
The clubs of Paris and the insurrectionary Commune were not less
scrupulously obeyed at the time of the Revolution. An order
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