| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Extracts From Adam's Diary by Mark Twain: thing.
Next Day
I have been comparing the new one with the old one, and it is
perfectly plain that they are the same breed. I was going to stuff
one of them for my collection, but she is prejudiced against it
for some reason or other; so I have relinquished the idea, though
I think it is a mistake. It would be an irreparable loss to science
if they should get away. The old one is tamer than it was, and
can laugh and talk like the parrot, having learned this, no doubt,
from being with the parrot so much, and having the imitative faculty
in a highly developed degree. I shall be astonished if it turns
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Straight Deal by Owen Wister: here. We share not only the same mother-tongue, we share every other
fundamental thing upon which our welfare rests and our lives are carried
on. We like the same things, we hate the same things. We have the same
notions about justice, law, conduct; about what a man should be, about
what a woman should be. It is like the mother-tongue we share, yet speak
with a difference. Take the mother-tongue for a parable and symbol of all
the rest. Just as the word "girl" is identical to our sight but not to
our hearing, and means oh! quite the same thing throughout us all in all
its meanings, so that identity of nature which we share comes often to
the surface in different guise. Our loquacity estranges the Englishman,
his silence estranges us. Behind that silence beats the English heart,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Poems by T. S. Eliot: Which tangle Ariadne's hair
And swell with haste the perjured sails.
Morning stirs the feet and hands
(Nausicaa and Polypheme),
Gesture of orang-outang
Rises from the sheets in steam.
This withered root of knots of hair
Slitted below and gashed with eyes,
This oval O cropped out with teeth:
The sickle motion from the thighs
Jackknifes upward at the knees
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