| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Inaugural Address by John F. Kennedy: We shall not always expect to find them supporting our view.
But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their
own freedom. . .and to remember that. . .in the past. . .those who
foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.
To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe
struggling to break the bonds of mass misery: we pledge our best
efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period
is required. . .not because the Communists may be doing it,
not because we seek their votes, but because it is right.
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor,
it cannot save the few who are rich.
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Chouans by Honore de Balzac: The advice seemed so good that Coupiau followed it. The patriot helped
him to conceal the coach behind a wood-pile; the abbe seized the
occasion to pull Coupiau aside and say to him, in a low voice: "Has he
really any money?"
"Hey, Monsieur Gudin, if it gets into the pockets of your Reverence,
they won't be weighed down with it."
When the Blues marched by, after the encounter on La Pelerine, they
were in such haste to reach Ernee that they passed the little inn
without halting. At the sound of their hasty march, Gudin and the
innkeeper, stirred by curiosity, went to the gate of the courtyard to
watch them. Suddenly, the fat ecclesiastic rushed to a soldier who was
The Chouans |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Middlemarch by George Eliot: glare over that long-unvisited past which has been habitually
recalled only in general phrases. Even without memory, the life
is bound into one by a zone of dependence in growth and decay;
but intense memory forces a man to own his blameworthy past.
With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is
not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present:
it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still
quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and
the tinglings of a merited shame.
Into this second life Bulstrode's past had now risen, only the
pleasures of it seeming to have lost their quality. Night and day,
Middlemarch |
