| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Fisherman's Luck by Henry van Dyke: fish.
Away down at the tail of the pool, dimly visible through the gloom,
the furtive fisherman, Parsons, had anchored his boat. No noise
ever came from that craft. If he wished to change his position, he
did not pull up the anchor and let it down again with a bump. He
simply lengthened or shortened his anchor rope. There was no click
of the reel when he played a fish. He drew in and paid out the line
through the rings by hand, without a sound. What he thought when a
fish got away, no one knew, for he never said it. He concealed his
angling as if it had been a conspiracy. Twice that night they heard
a faint splash in the water near his boat, and twice they saw him
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane: She felt she would love to see somebody entangle their fingers
in the oily beard of the fat foreigner who owned the establishment.
He was a detestable creature. He wore white socks with low shoes.
When he tired of this amusement he would go to the mummies and
moralize over them.
Usually he submitted with silent dignity to all which he had
to go through, but, at times, he was goaded into comment.
"What deh hell," he demanded once. "Look at all dese little
jugs! Hundred jugs in a row! Ten rows in a case an' 'bout a
t'ousand cases! What deh blazes use is dem?"
Evenings during the week he took her to see plays in which the
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift: stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it
will equally serve in a fricasie, or a ragoust.
I do therefore humbly offer it to publick consideration, that of
the hundred and twenty thousand children, already computed,
twenty thousand may be reserved for breed, whereof only one
fourth part to be males; which is more than we allow to sheep,
black cattle, or swine, and my reason is, that these children are
seldom the fruits of marriage, a circumstance not much regarded
by our savages, therefore, one male will be sufficient to serve
four females. That the remaining hundred thousand may, at a year
old, be offered in sale to the persons of quality and fortune,
A Modest Proposal |
