| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Common Sense by Thomas Paine: iron, and cordage are only articles of commerce.
In point of safety, ought we to be without a fleet? We are not the
little people now, which we were sixty years ago; at that time we might
have trusted our property in the streets, or fields rather; and slept
securely without locks or bolts to our doors or windows. The case now
is altered, and our methods of defense ought to improve with our increase
of property. A common pirate, twelve months ago, might have come up
the Delaware, and laid the city of Philadelphia under instant contribution,
for what sum he pleased; and the same might have happened to other places.
Nay, any daring fellow, in a brig of fourteen or sixteen guns might have
robbed the whole continent, and carried off half a million of money.
Common Sense |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from An Historical Mystery by Honore de Balzac: him up upon the main road. Horses, however, seem in times of peril to
share their masters' thought.
While the young countess was hesitating to follow Marthe, and asking
explanations, Michu, from his vantage-ground watched the closing in of
the gendarmes and understood their plan. He grew desperate as time
went by and the countess did not come to him. A squad of gendarmes
were marching along the park wall and stationing themselves as
sentinels, each man being near enough to communicate with those on
either side of them, by voice and eye. Michu, lying flat on his
stomach, his ear to earth, gauged, like a red Indian, by the strength
of the sounds the time that remained to him.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald: Coronado, where his mother became so bored that she had a nervous
breakdown in a fashionable hotel, down to Mexico City, where she
took a mild, almost epidemic consumption. This trouble pleased
her, and later she made use of it as an intrinsic part of her
atmosphere especially after several astounding bracers.
So, while more or less fortunate little rich boys were defying
governesses on the beach at Newport, or being spanked or tutored
or read to from "Do and Dare," or "Frank on the Mississippi,"
Amory was biting acquiescent bell-boys in the Waldorf, outgrowing
a natural repugnance to chamber music and symphonies, and
deriving a highly specialized education from his mother.
This Side of Paradise |
