| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne: what beings live, or can live, twelve or fifteen miles beneath
the surface of the waters--what is the organisation of these animals,
we can scarcely conjecture. However, the solution of the problem
submitted to me may modify the form of the dilemma. Either we do know
all the varieties of beings which people our planet, or we do not.
If we do NOT know them all--if Nature has still secrets in the deeps
for us, nothing is more conformable to reason than to admit the existence
of fishes, or cetaceans of other kinds, or even of new species,
of an organisation formed to inhabit the strata inaccessible to soundings,
and which an accident of some sort has brought at long intervals
to the upper level of the ocean.
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Astoria by Washington Irving: all took their cue from him, and not an otter-skin was to be had
at a reasonable rate.
The old fellow, however, overshot his mark, and mistook the
character of the man he was treating with. Thorn was a plain,
straightforward sailor, who never had two minds nor two prices in
his dealings, was deficient in patience and pliancy, and totally
wanting in the chicanery of traffic. He had a vast deal of stern
but honest pride in his nature, and, moreover, held the whole
savage race in sovereign contempt. Abandoning all further
attempts, therefore, to bargain with his shuffling customers, he
thrust his hands into his pockets, and paced up and down the deck
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: world was plain before I knew him, a poor penny world; but soon it
was all coloured with romance. If I go to the theatre to see a
good old melodrama, 'tis but Skelt a little faded. If I visit a
bold scene in nature, Skelt would have been bolder; there had been
certainly a castle on that mountain, and the hollow tree - that set
piece - I seem to miss it in the foreground. Indeed, out of this
cut-and-dry, dull, swaggering, obtrusive, and infantile art, I seem
to have learned the very spirit of my life's enjoyment; met there
the shadows of the characters I was to read about and love in a
late future; got the romance of DER FREISCHUTZ long ere I was to
hear of Weber or the mighty Formes; acquired a gallery of scenes
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