| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table by Oliver Wendell Holmes: a year beforehand, nothing else was talked about but the awful
noise that was to be made on the great occafion. When the time
came, everybody had their ears so wide open, to hear the universal
ejaculation of BOO, - the word agreed upon, - that nobody spoke
except a deaf man in one of the Fejee Islands, and a woman in
Pekin, so that the world was never so ftill fince the creation." -
There was nothing better than these things and there was not a
little that was much worse. A young fellow of two or three and
twenty has as good a right to spoil a magazine-full of essays in
learning how to write, as an oculist like Wenzel had to spoil his
hat-full of eyes in learning how to operate for cataract, or an
The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Fables by Robert Louis Stevenson: boys and girls limped about their play like convicts. Doubtless it
was more pitiable to see and more painful to bear in youth; but
even the grown folk, besides being very unhandy on their feet, were
often sick with ulcers.
About the time when Jack was ten years old, many strangers began to
journey through that country. These he beheld going lightly by on
the long roads, and the thing amazed him. "I wonder how it comes,"
he asked, "that all these strangers are so quick afoot, and we must
drag about our fetter?"
"My dear boy," said his uncle, the catechist, "do not complain
about your fetter, for it is the only thing that makes life worth
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: tumultuous, a flock of starlings.
"Jasper!" said Mr Bankes. They turned the way the starlings flew, over
the terrace. Following the scatter of swift-flying birds in the sky they
stepped through the gap in the high hedge straight into Mr Ramsay, who
boomed tragically at them, "Some one had blundered!"
His eyes, glazed with emotion, defiant with tragic intensity, met theirs
for a second, and trembled on the verge of recognition; but then, raising
his hand, half-way to his face as if to avert, to brush off, in an agony
of peevish shame, their normal gaze, as if he begged them to withhold for
a moment what he knew to be inevitable, as if he impressed upon them his
own child-like resentment of interruption, yet even in the moment of
To the Lighthouse |
