| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: alone and under the staggering weight of all the responsibilities
connected with the position. When an apprentice has become pretty
thoroughly acquainted with the river, he goes clattering along
so fearlessly with his steamboat, night or day, that he presently
begins to imagine that it is HIS courage that animates him;
but the first time the pilot steps out and leaves him to his
own devices he finds out it was the other man's. He discovers
that the article has been left out of his own cargo altogether.
The whole river is bristling with exigencies in a moment;
he is not prepared for them; he does not know how to meet them;
all his knowledge forsakes him; and within fifteen minutes
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Iliad by Homer: Helos, and Dorium, where the Muses met Thamyris, and stilled his
minstrelsy for ever. He was returning from Oechalia, where
Eurytus lived and reigned, and boasted that he would surpass even
the Muses, daughters of aegis-bearing Jove, if they should sing
against him; whereon they were angry, and maimed him. They robbed
him of his divine power of song, and thenceforth he could strike
the lyre no more. These were commanded by Nestor, knight of
Gerene, and with him there came ninety ships.
And those that held Arcadia, under the high mountain of Cyllene,
near the tomb of Aepytus, where the people fight hand to hand;
the men of Pheneus also, and Orchomenus rich in flocks; of
The Iliad |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tess of the d'Urbervilles, A Pure Woman by Thomas Hardy: phlegmatically waiting for the call, now trooped
towards the steading in the background, their great
bags of milk swinging under them as they walked.
Tess followed slowly in their rear, and entered the barton
by the open gate through which they had entered before
her. Long thatched sheds stretched round the
enclosure, their slopes encrusted with vivid green
moss, and their eaves supported by wooden posts rubbed
to a glossy smoothness by the flanks of infinite cows
and calves of bygone years, now passed to an oblivion
almost inconceivable in its profundity. Between the
Tess of the d'Urbervilles, A Pure Woman |
