| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Within the Tides by Joseph Conrad: . . . Madness, of course - but he could not give it up. He had
listened to that confounded busybody arranging everything - while
all these people stood around assenting, under the spell of that
dead romance. He had listened scornful and silent. The glimmers
of hope, of opportunity, passed before his eyes. He had only to
sit still and say nothing. That and no more. And what was truth
to him in the face of that great passion which had flung him
prostrate in spirit at her adored feet!
And now it was done! Fatality had willed it! With the eyes of a
mortal struck by the maddening thunderbolt of the gods, Renouard
looked up to the sky, an immense black pall dusted over with gold,
Within the Tides |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The White Moll by Frank L. Packard: banknotes as it would hold. She had tried to argue that the fact
that he was so insistently at work to defeat Danglar's plans was in
his favor; but that argument, like all others, came quickly and
miserably to grief. Where the "leak" was, as Danglar called it,
that supplied the Adventurer with foreknowledge of the gang's
movements, she had no idea, save that perhaps the Adventurer and
some traitor in the gang were in collusion for their own ends - and
that certainly did not lift the Adventurer to any higher plane, or
wash from him the stigma of thief.
She clenched her hands. It was all an attempt at argument without
the basis of a single logical premise. It was silly and childish!
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: "Let him fight, instead of shooting him."
He used to call these cases of desertion his "leg cases," and
sometimes when considering them, would tell the story of the
Irish soldier, upbraided by his captain, who replied: "Captain, I
have a heart in me breast as brave as Julius Caesar, but when I
go into battle, Sor, these cowardly legs of mine will run away
with me."
As the war went on, Mr. Lincoln objected more and more to
approving sentences of death by court-martial, and either
pardoned them outright, or delayed the execution "until further
orders," which orders were never given by the great-hearted,
|
