| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Jungle by Upton Sinclair: afternoon or evening, there was never one instant's rest for a man, for his
hand or his eye or his brain. Jurgis saw how they managed it; there were
portions of the work which determined the pace of the rest, and for these
they had picked men whom they paid high wages, and whom they changed
frequently. You might easily pick out these pacemakers, for they worked
under the eye of the bosses, and they worked like men possessed. This was
called "speeding up the gang," and if any man could not keep up with the
pace, there were hundreds outside begging to try.
Yet Jurgis did not mind it; he rather enjoyed it. It saved him the
necessity of flinging his arms about and fidgeting as he did in most work.
He would laugh to himself as he ran down the line, darting a glance now
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Life of the Spider by J. Henri Fabre: take the place of the farm. Why should not physical science step
in as well? It would leave the preparation of plastic food to the
chemist's retorts; it would reserve for itself that of energy-
producing food, which, reduced to its exact terms, ceases to be
matter. With the aid of some ingenious apparatus, it would pump
into us our daily ration of solar energy, to be later expended in
movement, whereby the machine would be kept going without the often
painful assistance of the stomach and its adjuncts. What a
delightful world, where one would lunch off a ray of sunshine!
Is it a dream, or the anticipation of a remote reality? The
problem is one of the most important that science can set us. Let
The Life of the Spider |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Wrecker by Stevenson & Osbourne: a squall, no danger to the ship, and scarce more than usual to
the doubtful spars. All hands were on deck in their oilskins,
expecting breakfast; the galley smoked, the ship smelt of
coffee, all were in good humour to be speeding eastward a full
nine; when the rotten foresail tore suddenly between two cloths
and then split to either hand. It was for all the world as though
some archangel with a huge sword had slashed it with the
figure of a cross; all hands ran to secure the slatting canvas;
and in the sudden uproar and alert, Tommy Hadden lost his
head. Many of his days have been passed since then in
explaining how the thing happened; of these explanations it
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