| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving: and with the bridle under his feet, soberly cropping the grass at
his master's gate. Ichabod did not make his appearance at
breakfast; dinner-hour came, but no Ichabod. The boys assembled
at the schoolhouse, and strolled idly about the banks of the
brook; but no schoolmaster. Hans Van Ripper now began to feel
some uneasiness about the fate of poor Ichabod, and his saddle.
An inquiry was set on foot, and after diligent investigation they
came upon his traces. In one part of the road leading to the
church was found the saddle trampled in the dirt; the tracks of
horses' hoofs deeply dented in the road, and evidently at furious
speed, were traced to the bridge, beyond which, on the bank of a
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Sophist by Plato: to predicate anything of anything; they say that good is good, and man is
man; and that to affirm one of the other would be making the many one and
the one many. Let us place them in a class with our previous opponents,
and interrogate both of them at once. Shall we assume (1) that being and
rest and motion, and all other things, are incommunicable with one another?
or (2) that they all have indiscriminate communion? or (3) that there is
communion of some and not of others? And we will consider the first
hypothesis first of all.
(1) If we suppose the universal separation of kinds, all theories alike are
swept away; the patrons of a single principle of rest or of motion, or of a
plurality of immutable ideas--all alike have the ground cut from under
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Aspern Papers by Henry James: the boat and rambled, so that I was not obliged to consider him,
and I told him that that day, for a change, I would touch
no meat. It was an effect of poor Miss Tita's proposal,
not altogether auspicious, that I had quite lost my appetite.
I don't know why it happened that on this occasion I was more than
ever struck with that queer air of sociability, of cousinship
and family life, which makes up half the expression of Venice.
Without streets and vehicles, the uproar of wheels, the brutality
of horses, and with its little winding ways where people
crowd together, where voices sound as in the corridors of a house,
where the human step circulates as if it skirted the angles
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