| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Before Adam by Jack London: impact that it drove a score of splinters, like fiery
needles, into my leg. Had it struck me it would have
killed me.
And then the river current caught us. So wildly were
we paddling that Red-Eye was the first to notice it,
and our first warning was his yell of triumph. Where
the edge of the current struck the slough-water was a
series of eddies or small whirlpools. These caught our
clumsy logs and whirled them end for end, back and
forth and around. We quit paddling and devoted our
whole energy to holding the logs together alongside
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Father Sergius by Leo Tolstoy: the elm tree.
It was a wonderful May evening, when the birches, aspens, elms,
wild cherries, and oaks, had just burst into foliage.
The bush of wild cherries behind the elm tree was in full bloom
and had not yet begun to shed its blossoms, and the
nightingales--one quite near at hand and two or three others in
the bushes down by the river--burst into full song after some
preliminary twitters. From the river came the far-off songs of
peasants returning, no doubt, from their work. The sun was
setting behind the forest, its last rays glowing through the
leaves. All that side was brilliant green, the other side with
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from An Inland Voyage by Robert Louis Stevenson: humour and injustice. A poor figure I must have presented to Burns
upon the hill-top with his team. But there was the paddle in my
hand. On my tomb, if ever I have one, I mean to get these words
inscribed: 'He clung to his paddle.'
The CIGARETTE had gone past a while before; for, as I might have
observed, if I had been a little less pleased with the universe at
the moment, there was a clear way round the tree-top at the farther
side. He had offered his services to haul me out, but as I was
then already on my elbows, I had declined, and sent him down stream
after the truant ARETHUSA. The stream was too rapid for a man to
mount with one canoe, let alone two, upon his hands. So I crawled
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