| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from American Notes by Rudyard Kipling: the good salmon goes to smoke his pipe after meals. Get such a
stream amid fields of breast-high crops surrounded by hills of
pines, throw in where you please quiet water, long-fenced
meadows, and a hundred-foot bluff just to keep the scenery from
growing too monotonous, and you will get some faint notion of the
Clackamas. The weir had been erected to pen the Chenook salmon
from going further up-stream. We could see them, twenty or thirty
pounds, by the score in the deep pools, or flying madly against
the weir and foolishly skinning their noses. They were not our
prey, for they would not rise at a fly, and we knew it. All the
same, when one made his leap against the weir, and landed on the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Some Reminiscences by Joseph Conrad: in the reduced kingdom established by the Congress of Vienna--I
must say that from all that more distant past, known to me
traditionally and a little de visu, and called out by the words
of the man just gone away, he remains the most incomplete figure.
It is obvious that I must have seen him in '64, for it is certain
that he would not have missed the opportunity of seeing my mother
for what he must have known would be the last time. From my
early boyhood to this day, if I try to call up his image, a sort
of mist rises before my eyes, a mist in which I perceive vaguely
only a neatly brushed head of white hair (which is exceptional in
the case of the B. family, where it is the rule for men to go
Some Reminiscences |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Complete Poems of Longfellow by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: His immeasurable falsehoods.
Very boastful was Iagoo;
Never heard he an adventure
But himself had met a greater;
Never any deed of daring
But himself had done a bolder;
Never any marvellous story
But himself could tell a stranger.
Would you listen to his boasting,
Would you only give him credence,
No one ever shot an arrow
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