| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain: republic in his head. It reminded me of a time thirteen
centuries away, when the "poor whites" of our South
who were always despised and frequently insulted by
the slave-lords around them, and who owed their base
condition simply to the presence of slavery in their
midst, were yet pusillanimously ready to side with the
slave-lords in all political moves for the upholding and
perpetuating of slavery, and did also finally shoulder
their muskets and pour out their lives in an effort to
prevent the destruction of that very institution which
degraded them. And there was only one redeeming
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Russia in 1919 by Arthur Ransome: in choosing in a hurry between this and that I did not
omit much which could with advantage be substituted for
what is here set down. There is nothing here of my talk with
the English soldier prisoners and nothing of my visit to the
officers confined in the Butyrka Gaol. There is nothing of
the plagues of typhus and influenza, or of the desperate
situation of a people thus visited and unable to procure from
abroad the simplest drugs which they cannot manufacture at
home or even the anaesthetics necessary for their wounded
on every frontier of their country. I forgot to describe the
ballet which I saw a few days before leaving. I have said
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas: his own eyes, watchful to see that everything should be put
in which might be useful to a young man entering on his
first campaign.
At length, after occupying about an hour in these
preparations, he opened the door of the room in which the
vicomte slept, and entered.
The sun, already high, penetrated into the room through the
window, the curtains of which Raoul had neglected to close
on the previous evening. He was still sleeping, his head
gracefully reposing on his arm.
Athos approached and hung over the youth in an attitude full
Twenty Years After |
