| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Tom Sawyer Abroad by Mark Twain: stood out on a slant, and it was the prettiest thing I
ever see, and made me drunk to look at it. They was
all Moslems, Tom said, and when I asked him what a
Moslem was, he said it was a person that wasn't a
Presbyterian. So there is plenty of them in Missouri,
though I didn't know it before.
We didn't see half there was to see in Cairo, because
Tom was in such a sweat to hunt out places that was
celebrated in history. We had a most tiresome time to
find the granary where Joseph stored up the grain
before the famine, and when we found it it warn't
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tales of Unrest by Joseph Conrad: putting the bottles on the shelf, trying to fit with trembling hands
the covers on cardboard boxes. Whenever the real sense of what she had
heard emerged for a second from the haze of her thoughts she would
fancy that something had exploded in her brain without, unfortunately,
bursting her head to pieces--which would have been a relief. She blew
the candles out one by one without knowing it, and was horribly
startled by the darkness. She fell on a bench and began to whimper.
After a while she ceased, and sat listening to the breathing of her
daughter, whom she could hardly see, still and upright, giving no
other sign of life. She was becoming old rapidly at last, during those
minutes. She spoke in tones unsteady, cut about by the rattle of
Tales of Unrest |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: never observed what is the retiring allowance of a field officer;
or do they suppose their contributions to the arts of pleasing more
important than the services of a colonel? Perhaps they forget on
how little Millet was content to live; or do they think, because
they have less genius, they stand excused from the display of equal
virtues? But upon one point there should be no dubiety: if a man
be not frugal, he has no business in the arts. If he be not
frugal, he steers directly for that last tragic scene of LE VIEUX
SALTIMBANQUE; if he be not frugal, he will find it hard to continue
to be honest. Some day, when the butcher is knocking at the door,
he may be tempted, he may be obliged, to turn out and sell a
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