| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Scaramouche by Rafael Sabatini: but very pale and haggard of face, seeming suddenly to have
increased in years, to have reached in appearance the age that was
in fact his own.
As he ate and drank - and this with appetite, for as he told them
he had not tasted food since early morning - he entered into the
details of the dreadful events of the day, and gave them the
particulars of his own escape from the Tuileries when all was seen
to be lost and when the Swiss, having burnt their last cartridge,
were submitting to wholesale massacre at the hands of the
indescribably furious mob.
"Oh, it was all most ill done," he ended critically. "We were timid
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from What is Man? by Mark Twain: WAS YOUR SHAME?"
The missionary's anguish of remorse and sense of treachery
were as bitter and persecuting and unappeasable, now, as they had
been in the former case. The story is finished. What is your
comment?
Y.M. The man's conscience is a fool! It was morbid. It
didn't know right from wrong.
O.M. I am not sorry to hear you say that. If you grant
that ONE man's conscience doesn't know right from wrong, it is an
admission that there are others like it. This single admission
pulls down the whole doctrine of infallibility of judgment in
What is Man? |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: the Gulf of Nankin, which is the most northern part of the coast of
China. The old man said he knew the Gulf of Nankin very well; but
smiling, asked us what we would do there? I told him we would sell
our cargo and purchase China wares, calicoes, raw silks, tea,
wrought silks, &c.; and so we would return by the same course we
came. He told us our best port would have been to put in at Macao,
where we could not have failed of a market for our opium to our
satisfaction, and might for our money have purchased all sorts of
China goods as cheap as we could at Nankin.
Not being able to put the old man out of his talk, of which he was
very opinionated or conceited, I told him we were gentlemen as well
Robinson Crusoe |
