| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Time Machine by H. G. Wells: comes with time travelling. And this time I was not seated
properly in the saddle, but sideways and in an unstable fashion.
For an indefinite time I clung to the machine as it swayed and
vibrated, quite unheeding how I went, and when I brought myself
to look at the dials again I was amazed to find where I had
arrived. One dial records days, and another thousands of days,
another millions of days, and another thousands of millions.
Now, instead of reversing the levers, I had pulled them over so
as to go forward with them, and when I came to look at these
indicators I found that the thousands hand was sweeping round as
fast as the seconds hand of a watch--into futurity.
The Time Machine |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne: At first there was a deep silence, not only within the shadow
of the Talking Oak, but all through the solitary wood. In a
moment or two, however, the leaves of the oak began to stir and
rustle, as if a gentle breeze were wandering amongst them,
although the other trees of the wood were perfectly still. The
sound grew louder, and became like the roar of a high wind. By
and by, Jason imagined that he could distinguish words, but
very confusedly, because each separate leaf of the tree seemed
to be a tongue, and the whole myriad of tongues were babbling
at once. But the noise waxed broader and deeper, until it
resembled a tornado sweeping through the oak, and making one
Tanglewood Tales |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Message by Honore de Balzac: vehicle and clinging tightly to the roof, as I did. He either
miscalculated in some way, or he slipped; how it happened, I do
not know, but the coach fell over upon him, and he was crushed
under it.
We carried him into a peasant's cottage, and there, amid the
moans wrung from him by horrible sufferings, he contrived to give
me a commission--a sacred task, in that it was laid upon me by a
dying man's last wish. Poor boy, all through his agony he was
torturing himself in his young simplicity of heart with the
thought of the painful shock to his mistress when she should
suddenly read of his death in a newspaper. He begged me to go
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