| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Last War: A World Set Free by H. G. Wells: are pitiful little decorations, clumsy models, feeble drawings.
These efforts are almost incredibly inept, like the drawings of
blindfolded men, they are only one shade less harrowing to a
sympathetic observer than the scratchings one finds upon the
walls of the old prisons, but there they are, witnessing to the
poor buried instincts that struggled up towards the light. That
god of joyous expression our poor fathers ignorantly sought, our
freedom has declared to us....
In the old days the common ambition of every simple soul was to
possess a little property, a patch of land, a house uncontrolled
by others, an 'independence' as the English used to put it. And
The Last War: A World Set Free |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Bureaucracy by Honore de Balzac: careers, such as civil and military engineering, the navy, mining, and
the professorial chair were all fenced about by strict regulations or
to be obtained only by competition; whereas in the civil service the
revolving wheel which turned clerks into prefects, sub-prefects,
assessors, and collectors, like the figures in a magic lantern, was
subjected to no such rules and entailed no drudgery. Through this easy
gap emerged into life the rich supernumeraries who drove their
tilburys, dressed well, and wore moustachios, all of them as impudent
as parvenus. Journalists were apt to persecute the tribe, who were
cousins, nephews, brothers, or other relatives of some minister, some
deputy, or an influential peer. The humbler clerks regarded them as a
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from In a German Pension by Katherine Mansfield: laughter.
"I AM cheerful," mumbled the old woman, and beat upon the table with her
fist, keeping time to the music, proving she was not out of the
festivities.
"She can't forget how wild Theresa has been," said Frau Ledermann. "Who
could--with the child there? I heard that last Sunday evening Theresa had
hysterics and said that she would not marry this man. They had to get the
priest to her."
"Where is the other one?" asked Frau Brechenmacher. "Why didn't he marry
her?"
The woman shrugged her shoulders.
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