| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne: we could draw this air freely into our lungs, and it was the breeze,
the breeze alone, that filled us with this keen enjoyment.
"Ah!" said Conseil, "how delightful this oxygen is!
Master need not fear to breathe it. There is enough for everybody."
Ned Land did not speak, but he opened his jaws wide enough
to frighten a shark. Our strength soon returned, and, when I
looked round me, I saw we were alone on the platform.
The foreign seamen in the Nautilus were contented with the air
that circulated in the interior; none of them had come to drink
in the open air.
The first words I spoke were words of gratitude and
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carroll: and--"
"She doesn't forget it, Minnie!" the Mother laughingly replied.
"I do wish they'd get it settled! I don't like long engagements."
And Minnie wound up the conversation--if so chaotic a series of remarks
deserves the name--with "Only think! We passed the Cedars this
morning, just exactly as Mary Davenant was standing at the gate,
wishing good-bye to Mister---I forget his name. Of course we looked
the other way."
By this time I was so hopelessly confused that I gave up listening,
and followed the dinner down into the kitchen.
But to you, O hypercritical reader, resolute to believe no item of this
Sylvie and Bruno |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: with the impulsiveness by which his boyhood friends remember him.
He never seems to me to grow older. His fresh color and sandy
hair and quick-changing blue eyes are those of a young man,
and his sympathetic, solicitous interest in women is as youthful
as it is Western and American.
During that burning day when we were crossing Iowa,
our talk kept returning to a central figure, a Bohemian girl
whom we had known long ago and whom both of us admired.
More than any other person we remembered, this girl seemed
to mean to us the country, the conditions, the whole adventure
of our childhood. To speak her name was to call up pictures
My Antonia |
