| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Moby Dick by Herman Melville: one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east
reverenced in their statue devil;--Ahab did not fall down and worship
it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred
white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that
most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all
truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the
brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to
crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable
in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all
the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and
then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's
Moby Dick |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: heard a terrible noise in the same wood on our left, only that it
was farther onward, the same way we were to go.
The night was coming on, and the light began to be dusky, which
made it worse on our side; but the noise increasing, we could
easily perceive that it was the howling and yelling of those
hellish creatures; and on a sudden we perceived three troops of
wolves, one on our left, one behind us, and one in our front, so
that we seemed to be surrounded with them: however, as they did not
fall upon us, we kept our way forward, as fast as we could make our
horses go, which, the way being very rough, was only a good hard
trot. In this manner, we came in view of the entrance of a wood,
Robinson Crusoe |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: impression they produced was that of having in common one memory
so deep and dark that nothing that had happened since was worth
either a growl or a wag.
"I say," I broke out abruptly, addressing myself to the dumb
circle, "do you know what you look like, the whole lot of you?
You look as if you'd seen a ghost--that's how you look! I wonder
if there IS a ghost here, and nobody but you left for it to
appear to?" The dogs continued to gaze at me without moving. . .
It was dark when I saw Lanrivain's motor lamps at the cross-
roads--and I wasn't exactly sorry to see them. I had the sense
of having escaped from the loneliest place in the whole world,
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