| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from 1984 by George Orwell: Eurasia and Eastasia? You have not conquered them yet.'
'Unimportant. We shall conquer them when it suits us. And if we did not,
what difference would it make? We can shut them out of existence. Oceania
is the world.'
'But the world itself is only a speck of dust. And man is tiny--helpless!
How long has he been in existence? For millions of years the earth was
uninhabited.'
'Nonsense. The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older?
Nothing exists except through human consciousness.'
'But the rocks are full of the bones of extinct animals--mammoths and
mastodons and enormous reptiles which lived here long before man was ever
1984 |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: at each other. Grandmother had told me while she was getting supper
that he was an Austrian who came to this country a young boy and had led
an adventurous life in the Far West among mining-camps and cow outfits.
His iron constitution was somewhat broken by mountain pneumonia,
and he had drifted back to live in a milder country for a while.
He had relatives in Bismarck, a German settlement to the north of us,
but for a year now he had been working for grandfather.
The minute supper was over, Otto took me into the kitchen to whisper to me
about a pony down in the barn that had been bought for me at a sale;
he had been riding him to find out whether he had any bad tricks,
but he was a `perfect gentleman,' and his name was Dude. Fuchs told
My Antonia |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Finished by H. Rider Haggard: Zululand, on the other hand, there are no magistrates before whom
I could depose, and if this business should come out, I can
always say that we went there to escape from the Basutos. Now I
am going to get down to see if the horses are all right. Do you
two talk the thing over and make up your minds. Whatever you
agree on, I shall accept and do my best to carry through." Then,
without waiting for an answer, I slipped from the cart.
Having examined the horses, who were cropping all the grass
within reach of them, I crept to the wall of the kraal so as to
be quite out of earshot. The night was now pitch dark, dark as
it only knows how to be in Africa. More, a thunderstorm was
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