| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Land of Footprints by Stewart Edward White: already occasioned considerable damage; the rape heads were bent
and destroyed for a space of perhaps ten feet from the outer edge
of the field. As this grain probably constituted the old man's food supply
for a season, I did not wonder at the vehemence with which he shook
his spear at his enemies, nor the apparent flavour of his language,
though I did marvel at his physical endurance. As for the birds,
they had become cynical and impudent; they barely fluttered out
of the way.
I halted the old gentleman and hastened to explain that I was
neither a pirate, a robber, nor an oppressor of the poor. This as
counter-check to his tendency to flee, leaving me in sole charge.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells: Seventhly, he never wearied in rational (as distinguished from
excessive, futile and expensive) precautions against the disease.
Eighthly, in the ill-equipped shops of his minor competitors lead
poisoning was a frequent and virulent evil, and people had
generalised from these exceptional cases. The small shops, he
hazarded, looking out of the cracked and dirty window at distant
chimneys, might be advantageously closed. . . .
"But what's the good of talking?" said my uncle, getting off the
table on which he had been sitting. "Seems to me there'll come a
time when a master will get fined if he don't run round the works
blowing his girls noses for them. That's about what it'll come to."
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Walking by Henry David Thoreau: to mark a road. He would not make that use of my figure. I walk
out into a nature such as the old prophets and poets, Menu,
Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may name it America, but it
is not America; neither Americus Vespueius, nor Columbus, nor the
rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer amount of it in
mythology than in any history of America, so called, that I have
seen.
However, there are a few old roads that may be trodden with
profit, as if they led somewhere now that they are nearly
discontinued. There is the Old Marlborough Road, which does not
go to Marlborough now, me- thinks, unless that is Marlborough
Walking |
