| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: into gunsmiths' shops and taken the guns and swords. They were
about a hundred. These were followed by about a thousand (I am
rather diminishing than exaggerating numbers all through),
indifferently armed with rusty sabres, sticks, etc. An uncountable
troop of gentlemen, workmen, shopkeepers' wives (Paris women dare
anything), ladies' maids, common women - in fact, a crowd of all
classes, though by far the greater number were of the better
dressed class - followed. Indeed, it was a splendid sight: the
mob in front chanting the "MARSEILLAISE," the national war hymn,
grave and powerful, sweetened by the night air - though night in
these splendid streets was turned into day, every window was filled
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells: have been growing in me, slowly, irregularly, assimilating to itself
all the phrases and forms of patriotism, diverting my religious
impulses, utilising my esthetic tendencies, my dominating idea, the
statesman's idea, that idea of social service which is the
protagonist of my story, that real though complex passion for
Making, making widely and greatly, cities, national order,
civilisation, whose interplay with all those other factors in life I
have set out to present. It was growing in me--as one's bones grow,
no man intending it.
I have tried to show how, quite early in my life, the fact of
disorderliness, the conception of social life as being a
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: for the big yellow pumpkins that lay about unprotected by their
withering vines--and I felt very little interest in it when I
got there. I wanted to walk straight on through the red grass
and over the edge of the world, which could not be very far away.
The light air about me told me that the world ended here:
only the ground and sun and sky were left, and if one
went a little farther there would be only sun and sky,
and one would float off into them, like the tawny hawks
which sailed over our heads making slow shadows on the grass.
While grandmother took the pitchfork we found standing
in one of the rows and dug potatoes, while I picked them
My Antonia |
