| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Road to Oz by L. Frank Baum: mast. When all were ready he raised the sail half-way. The wind
caught it. At once the sand-boat started forward--slowly at first,
then with added speed. The shaggy man pulled the sail way up, and
they flew so fast over the Deadly Desert that every one held fast to
the sides of the boat and scarcely dared to breathe.
The sand lay in billows, and was in places very uneven, so that the
boat rocked dangerously from side to side; but it never quite tipped
over, and the speed was so great that the shaggy man himself became
frightened and began to wonder how he could make the ship go slower.
"It we're spilled in this sand, in the middle of the desert," Dorothy
thought to herself, "we'll be nothing but dust in a few minutes, and
The Road to Oz |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sons of the Soil by Honore de Balzac: blow to the self-love of any one lower than one's self. An injury done
to a person's interest, no matter how great it may be at the time, is
forgiven or explained in the long run; but self-love, vanity, never
ceases to bleed from a wound given, and never forgives it. The moral
being is actually more sensitive, more living as it were, than the
physical being. The heart and the blood are less impressible than the
nerves. In short, our inward being rules us, no matter what we do. You
may reconcile two families who have half-killed each other, as in
Brittany and in La Vendee during the civil wars, but you can no more
reconcile the calumniators and the calumniated than you can the
spoilers and the despoiled. It is only in epic poems that men curse
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Horse's Tale by Mark Twain: the men salute me, and I return it. I am privileged to be present
when the Rocky Mountain Rangers troop the colors and I stand
solemn, like the children, and I salute when the flag goes by. Of
course when she goes to her fort her sentries sing out 'Turn out
the guard!' and then . . . do you catch that refreshing early-
morning whiff from the mountain-pines and the wild flowers? The
night is far spent; we'll hear the bugles before long. Dorcas, the
black woman, is very good and nice; she takes care of the
Lieutenant-General, and is Brigadier-General Alison's mother, which
makes her mother-in-law to the Lieutenant-General. That is what
Shekels says. At least it is what I think he says, though I never
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