| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: silence of the tomb.
Quickly I realized that the warriors had taken one of the
other corridors with their prisoner, and so I hastened back with
a feeling of considerable relief to take up a much safer and
more desirable position behind them. It was much slower
work returning, however, than it had been coming, for now
the darkness was as utter as the silence.
It was necessary to feel every foot of the way back with
my hand against the side wall, that I might not pass the spot
where the five roads radiated. After what seemed an eternity to
me, I reached the place and recognized it by groping across
The Gods of Mars |
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 perched on the stool and treadled at her machine all day,
turning out collars, the name of whose brand could be noted for its
irrelevancy to anything in connection with collars. At night she
returned home to her mother.
Jimmie grew large enough to take the vague position of head of
the family. As incumbent of that office, he stumbled up-stairs
late at night, as his father had done before him. He reeled about
the room, swearing at his relations, or went to sleep on the floor.
The mother had gradually arisen to that degree of fame that
she could bandy words with her acquaintances among the police-
justices. Court-officials called her by her first name. When she
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Moby Dick by Herman Melville: such a spectralness over the fancy, while that of the Yellow Sea
lulls us with mortal thoughts of long lacquered mild afternoons on
the waves, followed by the gaudiest and yet sleepiest of sunsets?
Or, to choose a wholly unsubstantial instance, purely addressed to
the fancy, why, in reading the old fairy tales of Central Europe,
does "the tall pale man" of the Hartz forests, whose changeless
pallor unrustlingly glides through the green of the groves--why is
this phantom more terrible than all the whooping imps of the
Blocksburg?
Nor is it, altogether, the remembrance of her cathedral-toppling
earthquakes; nor the stampedoes of her frantic seas; nor the
Moby Dick |
