| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: woods, when, for an hour, I doubted if the near neighborhood of man
was not essential to a serene and healthy life. To be alone was
something unpleasant. But I was at the same time conscious of a
slight insanity in my mood, and seemed to foresee my recovery. In
the midst of a gentle rain while these thoughts prevailed, I was
suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in
the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around
my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once
like an atmosphere sustaining me, as made the fancied advantages of
human neighborhood insignificant, and I have never thought of them
since. Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy
Walden |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Human Drift by Jack London: to lose an anchor. It is a matter of pride. Of course, we could
have buoyed ours and slipped it. Instead, however, I gave her
still more hawser, veered her, and dropped the second anchor.
There was little sleep after that, for first one and then the
other of us would be rolled out of our bunks. The increasing size
of the seas told us we were dragging, and when we struck the
scoured channel we could tell by the feel of it that our two
anchors were fairly skating across. It was a deep channel, the
farther edge of it rising steeply like the wall of a canyon, and
when our anchors started up that wall they hit in and held.
Yet, when we fetched up, through the darkness we could hear the
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: the falls for a slumber-song all night and the whole river for a
bath at sunrise.
A sparkling draught of crystal weather was poured into our stirrup-
cup in the morning, as we set out for a drive of fifteen miles
across country to the Riviere a l'Ours, a tributary of the crooked,
unnavigable river of Alders. The canoes and luggage were loaded on
a couple of charrettes, or two-wheeled carts. But for us and the
guides there were two quatre-roues, the typical vehicles of the
century, as characteristic of Canada as the carriole is of Norway.
It is a two-seated buckboard, drawn by one horse, and the back seat
is covered with a hood like an old-fashioned poke bonnet. The road
|
