| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain: shudder! How gloriously he would go plowing the
dancing seas, in his long, low, black-hulled racer, the
Spirit of the Storm, with his grisly flag flying at
the fore! And at the zenith of his fame, how he would
suddenly appear at the old village and stalk into church,
brown and weather-beaten, in his black velvet doublet
and trunks, his great jack-boots, his crimson sash, his
belt bristling with horse-pistols, his crime-rusted cut-
lass at his side, his slouch hat with waving plumes,
his black flag unfurled, with the skull and crossbones
on it, and hear with swelling ecstasy the whisperings,
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Gobseck by Honore de Balzac: upon me; I divined that she would never allow me to see her husband. I
chatted on about indifferent matters for a little while, so as to
study her; but, like all women who have once begun to plot for
themselves, she could dissimulate with the rare perfection which, in
your sex, means the last degree of perfidy. If I may dare to say it, I
looked for anything from her, even a crime. She produced this feeling
in me, because it was so evident from her manner and in all that she
did or said, down to the very inflections of her voice, that she had
an eye to the future. I went.
"Now, I will pass on to the final scenes of this adventure, throwing
in a few circumstances brought to light by time, and some details
Gobseck |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from First Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln: that such decisions must be binding, in any case, upon the parties
to a suit, as to the object of that suit, while they are also entitled
to very high respect and consideration in all parallel cases by all other
departments of the government. And while it is obviously possible that
such decision may be erroneous in any given case, still the evil effect
following it, being limited to that particular case, with the chance that
it may be overruled and never become a precedent for other cases,
can better be borne than could the evils of a different practice.
At the same time, the candid citizen must confess that if the policy
of the government, upon vital questions affecting the whole people,
is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme Court,
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