| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne: After passing through a moderately thick copse, we found a plain
obstructed with bushes. I saw then those magnificent birds,
the disposition of whose long feathers obliges them to fly against
the wind. Their undulating flight, graceful aerial curves,
and the shading of their colours, attracted and charmed one's looks.
I had no trouble in recognising them.
"Birds of paradise!" I exclaimed.
The Malays, who carry on a great trade in these birds with the Chinese,
have several means that we could not employ for taking them.
Sometimes they put snares on the top of high trees that the birds
of paradise prefer to frequent. Sometimes they catch them with a
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Records of a Family of Engineers by Robert Louis Stevenson: navigation, the seafaring mind had been fully alive to the
perils of this reef. Repeated attempts had been made to mark
the place with beacons, but all efforts were unavailing (one
such beacon having been carried away within eight days of its
erection) until Robert Stevenson conceived and carried out the
idea of the stone tower. But the number of vessels actually
lost upon the reef was as nothing to those that were cast away
in fruitless efforts to avoid it. Placed right in the fairway
of two navigations, and one of these the entrance to the only
harbour of refuge between the Downs and the Moray Firth, it
breathed abroad along the whole coast an atmosphere of terror
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells: He had watery grey eyes, oddly void of expression.
Then just overhead came a sound like an iron bedstead being
knocked about, and the low angry growling of some large animal.
At the same time the man spoke. He repeated his question,--"How do you
feel now?"
I think I said I felt all right. I could not recollect how I
had got there. He must have seen the question in my face,
for my voice was inaccessible to me.
"You were picked up in a boat, starving. The name on the boat
was the `Lady Vain,' and there were spots of blood on the gunwale."
At the same time my eye caught my hand, thin so that it looked
The Island of Doctor Moreau |
