| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: one should know that not only must she pick her intricate
way through snags and blind reefs, and then shave the head
of the island so closely as to brush the overhanging foliage
with her stern, but at one place she must pass almost within
arm's reach of a sunken and invisible wreck that would snatch
the hull timbers from under her if she should strike it,
and destroy a quarter of a million dollars' worth of steam-boat
and cargo in five minutes, and maybe a hundred and fifty human
lives into the bargain.
The last remark I heard that night was a compliment to Mr. Bixby,
uttered in soliloquy and with unction by one of our guests. He said--
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Warlord of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs: ground became soft and mushy, so that it was with the greatest
difficulty that we made any headway whatever.
Slender purple grasses topped with red and yellow fern-like fronds
grew rankly all about us to the height of several feet above my head.
Myriad creepers hung festooned in graceful loops from tree to tree,
and among them were several varieties of the Martian "man-flower,"
whose blooms have eyes and hands with which to see and seize the
insects which form their diet.
The Warlord of Mars |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: the due of her beauty which she was generally utterly without; would
turn her head; would look so, over her shoulder, always with some
Minta, Paul, or William Bankes at her side. At length, standing
outside the group the very figure of a famished wolfhound (Lily got up
off the grass and stood looking at the steps, at the window, where she
had seen him), he would say her name, once only, for all the world like
a wolf barking in the snow, but still she held back; and he would say
it once more, and this time something in the tone would rouse her, and
she would go to him, leaving them all of a sudden, and they would walk
off together among the pear trees, the cabbages, and the raspberry
beds. They would have it out together. But with what attitudes and
To the Lighthouse |
