| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from St. Ives by Robert Louis Stevenson: us to do; and even in that we had advanced so far that the lot had
fallen on Shed B. It had been determined to mingle the bitter and
the sweet; and whoever went down first, the whole of his shed-mates
were to follow next in order. This caused a good deal of joy in
Shed B, and would have caused more if it had not still remained to
choose our pioneer. In view of the ambiguity in which we lay as to
the length of the rope and the height of the precipice - and that
this gentleman was to climb down from fifty to seventy fathoms on a
pitchy night, on a rope entirely free, and with not so much as an
infant child to steady it at the bottom, a little backwardness was
perhaps excusable. But it was, in our case, more than a little.
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens: He started backward, trembling from head to foot; but seeing who it
was, demanded why she came there. Before she could reply, he spoke
again.
'Am I to live or die? Do you murder too, or spare?'
'My son--our son,' she answered, 'is in this prison.'
'What is that to me?' he cried, stamping impatiently on the stone
pavement. 'I know it. He can no more aid me than I can aid him.
If you are come to talk of him, begone!'
As he spoke he resumed his walk, and hurried round the court as
before. When he came again to where she stood, he stopped, and
said,
Barnaby Rudge |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe: It is true that sick-beds are the time when such correspondences
as this are looked on with different countenances, and seen
with other eyes than we saw them with, or than they appeared
with before. My lover had been at the gates of death, and at
the very brink of eternity; and, it seems, had been struck with
a due remorse, and with sad reflections upon his past life of
gallantry and levity; and among the rest, criminal correspondence
with me, which was neither more nor less than a long-continued
life of adultery, and represented itself as it really was, not as
it had been formerly thought by him to be, and he looked upon
it now with a just and religious abhorrence.
Moll Flanders |
