| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Kidnapped Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum: people do me no real harm, but merely render themselves and their
children unhappy. Poor things! I'd much rather help them any day
than injure them."
Indeed, the Daemons could not tempt old Santa Claus in any way. On
the contrary, he was shrewd enough to see that their object in
visiting him was to make mischief and trouble, and his cheery laughter
disconcerted the evil ones and showed to them the folly of such an
undertaking. So they abandoned honeyed words and determined to use force.
It was well known that no harm can come to Santa Claus while he is in
the Laughing Valley, for the fairies, and ryls, and knooks all protect
him. But on Christmas Eve he drives his reindeer out into the big
 A Kidnapped Santa Claus |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: grow worth chucks in a Cincinnati graveyard, but in a Sent
Louis graveyard they grow upwards of eight hundred foot high.
It's all on account of the water the people drunk before they laid up.
A Cincinnati corpse don't richen a soil any.'
And they talked about how Ohio water didn't like to mix with
Mississippi water. Ed said if you take the Mississippi on a rise
when the Ohio is low, you'll find a wide band of clear water all the way
down the east side of the Mississippi for a hundred mile or more,
and the minute you get out a quarter of a mile from shore and pass
the line, it is all thick and yaller the rest of the way across.
Then they talked about how to keep tobacco from getting moldy,
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: brown to one looking directly down on it, and, like that of most
ponds, imparts to the body of one bathing in it a yellowish tinge;
but this water is of such crystalline purity that the body of the
bather appears of an alabaster whiteness, still more unnatural,
which, as the limbs are magnified and distorted withal, produces a
monstrous effect, making fit studies for a Michael Angelo.
The water is so transparent that the bottom can easily be
discerned at the depth of twenty-five or thirty feet. Paddling over
it, you may see, many feet beneath the surface, the schools of perch
and shiners, perhaps only an inch long, yet the former easily
distinguished by their transverse bars, and you think that they must
 Walden |