| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Heart of the West by O. Henry: the ten-forty train the next morning, when we was going on a bridal
tour to El Paso. His wife had decorated it all up with hollyhocks and
poison ivy, and it looked real festal and bowery.
"About ten o'clock that night I sets down in the front door and pulls
off my boots a while in the cool breeze, while Mrs. Hicks was fixing
around in the room. Right soon the light went out inside; and I sat
there a while reverberating over old times and scenes. And then I
heard Mrs. Hicks call out, 'Ain't you coming in soon, Lem?'
"'Well, well!' says I, kind of rousing up. 'Durn me if I wasn't
waiting for old Paisley to--'
"But when I got that far," concluded Telemachus Hicks, "I thought
Heart of the West |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The War in the Air by H. G. Wells: under the hand of her conqueror.
As that fact shaped itself in the public mind, there sprang up,
as flames spring up, an angry repudiation. "No!" cried New York,
waking in the dawn. "No! I am not defeated. This is a dream."
Before day broke the swift American anger was running through all
the city, through every soul in those contagious millions.
Before it took action, before it took shape, the men in the
airships could feel the gigantic insurgence of emotion, as cattle
and natural creatures feel, it is said, the coming of an
earthquake. The newspapers of the Knype group first gave the
thing words and a formula. "We do not agree," they said simply.
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne: Barbicane, "I have been asking myself whether, while confining
ourselves to our own particular objects, we could not enter upon
some grand experiment worthy of the nineteenth century; and
whether the progress of artillery science would not enable us to
carry it out to a successful issue. I have been considering,
working, calculating; and the result of my studies is the conviction
that we are safe to succeed in an enterprise which to any other
country would appear wholly impracticable. This project, the result
of long elaboration, is the object of my present communication.
It is worthy of yourselves, worthy of the antecedents of the Gun
Club; and it cannot fail to make some noise in the world."
From the Earth to the Moon |
