| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Underdogs by Mariano Azuela: Quickly, Blondie jumped behind the bar and with a
sweep of both arms, knocked down all the glasses and
bottles.
"Send the bill to General Villa, understand?"
He left, laughing loudly at his prank.
"Say there, you, where do the girls hang out?"
Blondie asked, reeling up drunkenly toward a small well-
dressed man, standing at the door of a tailor shop.
The man stepped down to the sidewalk politely to let
Blondie pass.
Blondie stopped and looked at him curiously, im-
The Underdogs |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad: have heard of a ship that gave her best speed on a wind when so
loaded as to float a couple of inches by the head.
I call to mind a winter landscape in Amsterdam - a flat foreground
of waste land, with here and there stacks of timber, like the huts
of a camp of some very miserable tribe; the long stretch of the
Handelskade; cold, stone-faced quays, with the snow-sprinkled
ground and the hard, frozen water of the canal, in which were set
ships one behind another with their frosty mooring-ropes hanging
slack and their decks idle and deserted, because, as the master
stevedore (a gentle, pale person, with a few golden hairs on his
chin and a reddened nose) informed me, their cargoes were frozen-in
The Mirror of the Sea |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin: of difficulty. Almost all oceanic islands, even the most isolated and
smallest, are inhabited by land-shells, generally by endemic species, but
sometimes by species found elsewhere. Dr. Aug. A. Gould has given several
interesting cases in regard to the land-shells of the islands of the
Pacific. Now it is notorious that land-shells are very easily killed by
salt; their eggs, at least such as I have tried, sink in sea-water and are
killed by it. Yet there must be, on my view, some unknown, but highly
efficient means for their transportal. Would the just-hatched young
occasionally crawl on and adhere to the feet of birds roosting on the
ground, and thus get transported? It occurred to me that land-shells, when
hybernating and having a membranous diaphragm over the mouth of the shell,
On the Origin of Species |
