| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass: living on a fraction more than a quarter of a pound of meat per
day, and less than a peck of corn-meal per week. There is no
kind of work that a man can do which requires a better supply of
food to prevent physical exhaustion, than the field-work of a
slave. So much for the slave's allowance of food; now for his
raiment. The yearly allowance of clothing for the slaves on this
plantation, consisted of two tow-linen shirts--such linen as the
coarsest crash towels are made of; one pair of trowsers of the
same material, for summer, and a pair of trowsers and a jacket of
woolen, most slazily put together, for winter; one pair of yarn
stockings, and one pair of shoes of the coarsest description.
My Bondage and My Freedom |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Pellucidar by Edgar Rice Burroughs: the external opening. The result was gradually increas-
ing darkness as one passed into each succeeding cham-
ber.
In the last of the three I could just distinguish objects,
and that was all. As I was groping around the walls
for the hole that should lead into the cave where Dian
was imprisoned, I heard a man's voice quite close to me.
The speaker had evidently but just entered, for he
spoke in a loud tone, demanding the whereabouts of
one whom he had come in search of.
"Where are you, woman?" he cried. "Hooja has sent
Pellucidar |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Touchstone by Edith Wharton: his slender store of reciprocity.
In the retrospective light shed by the letters he was blinded to
their specific meaning. He was not a man who concerned himself
with literature, and they had been to him, at first, simply the
extension of her brilliant talk, later the dreaded vehicle of a
tragic importunity. He knew, of course, that they were wonderful;
that, unlike the authors who give their essence to the public and
keep only a dry rind for their friends, Mrs. Aubyn had stored of
her rarest vintage for this hidden sacrament of tenderness.
Sometimes, indeed, he had been oppressed, humiliated almost, by
the multiplicity of her allusions, the wide scope of her
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