| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Virginian by Owen Wister: direction."
"What decided your direction?"
"Oh, looking for chances. I reckon I must have been more
ambitious than my brothers--or more restless. They stayed around
on farms. But I got out. When I went back again six years
afterward, I was twenty. They was talking about the same old
things. Men of twenty-five and thirty--yet just sittin' and
talkin' about the same old things. I told my mother about what
I'd seen here and there, and she liked it, right to her death.
But the others--well, when I found this whole world was hawgs and
turkeys to them, with a little gunnin' afteh small game throwed
The Virginian |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Tanach: Isaiah 38: 6 And I will deliver thee and this city out of the hand of the king of Assyria; and I will defend this city.
Isaiah 38: 7 And this shall be the sign unto thee from the LORD, that the LORD will do this thing that He hath spoken:
Isaiah 38: 8 behold, I will cause the shadow of the dial, which is gone down on the sun-dial of Ahaz, to return backward ten degrees.' So the sun returned ten degrees, by which degrees it was gone down.
Isaiah 38: 9 The writing of Hezekiah king of Judah, when he had been sick, and was recovered of his sickness.
Isaiah 38: 10 I said: In the noontide of my days I shall go, even to the gates of the nether-world; I am deprived of the residue of my years.
Isaiah 38: 11 I said: I shall not see the LORD, even the LORD in the land of the living; I shall behold man no more with the inhabitants of the world.
Isaiah 38: 12 My habitation is plucked up and carried away from me as a shepherd's tent; I have rolled up like a weaver my life; He will cut me off from the thrum; from day even to night wilt Thou make an end of me.
Isaiah 38: 13 The more I make myself like unto a lion until morning, the more it breaketh all my bones; from day even to night wilt Thou make an end of me.
Isaiah 38: 14 Like a swallow or a crane, so do I chatter, I do moan as a dove; mine eyes fail with looking upward. O LORD, I am oppressed, be Thou my surety.
The Tanach |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Falk by Joseph Conrad: how a case of "cannibalism and suffering at sea"
should be managed I said--"You were then so
lucky in the drawing of lots?"
"Drawing of lots?" he said. "What lots? Do
you think I would have allowed my life to go for
the drawing of lots?"
Not if he could help if, I perceived, no matter
what other life went.
"It was a great misfortune. Terrible. Awful,"
he said. "Many heads went wrong, but the best
men would live."
Falk |
