| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift: received, to learn and practise that infamous dexterity upon
others?"
He was perfectly astonished with the historical account gave him
of our affairs during the last century; protesting "it was only a
heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres,
revolutions, banishments, the very worst effects that avarice,
faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness,
hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition, could produce."
His majesty, in another audience, was at the pains to
recapitulate the sum of all I had spoken; compared the questions
he made with the answers I had given; then taking me into his
Gulliver's Travels |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Moby Dick by Herman Melville: Stubb quickly pulled to the floating body, and hailing the Pequod to
give notice of his intentions, at once proceeded to reap the fruit of
his unrighteous cunning. Seizing his sharp boat-spade, he commenced
an excavation in the body, a little behind the side fin. You would
almost have thought he was digging a cellar there in the sea; and
when at length his spade struck against the gaunt ribs, it was like
turning up old Roman tiles and pottery buried in fat English loam.
His boat's crew were all in high excitement, eagerly helping their
chief, and looking as anxious as gold-hunters.
And all the time numberless fowls were diving, and ducking, and
screaming, and yelling, and fighting around them. Stubb was
Moby Dick |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Black Dwarf by Walter Scott: now to have arranged his establishment for life.
It was impossible to engage him in any conversation on his own
personal affairs; nor was he communicative or accessible in
talking on any other subject whatever, although he seemed to have
considerably relented in the extreme ferocity of his misanthropy,
or rather to be less frequently visited with the fits of
derangement of which this was a symptom. No argument could
prevail upon him to accept anything beyond the simplest
necessaries, although much more was offered by Earnscliff out of
charity, and by his more superstitious neighbours from other
motives. The benefits of these last he repaid by advice, when
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