| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Faraday as a Discoverer by John Tyndall: of spongy platinum to cause the combination of oxygen and hydrogen
had been discovered by Dobereiner in 1823, and had been applied by
him in the construction of his well-known philosophic lamp. It was
shown subsequently by Dulong and Thenard that even a platinum wire,
when perfectly cleansed, may be raised to incandescence by its
action on a jet of cold hydrogen.
In his experiments on the decomposition of water, Faraday found that
the positive platinum plate of the decomposing cell possessed in an
extraordinary degree the power of causing oxygen and hydrogen to
combine. He traced the cause of this to the perfect cleanness of
the positive plate. Against it was liberated oxygen, which, with the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Blix by Frank Norris: old divers have a superstition--no, it AIN'T just a superstition,
I believe it's so--that drowned people really don't die till they
come to the surface, and the air touches them. We say that the
drowned who don't come up still have some sort of life of their
own way down there in all that green water...some kind of
life...surely...surely. When I went down the second time, I came
across the door of what I thought at first was the linen-closet.
But it turned out to be a little stateroom. I opened it. There
was the girl. She was sitting on the sofa opposite the door, with
a little hat on her head, and holding a satchel in her lap, just
as if she was ready to go ashore. Her eyes were wide open, and
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane: actions, apparent to all men.
If the army had gone gloriously on he would
be lost. If the din meant that now his army's
flags were tilted forward he was a condemned
wretch. He would be compelled to doom
himself to isolation. If the men were advancing,
their indifferent feet were trampling upon his
chances for a successful life.
As these thoughts went rapidly through his
mind, he turned upon them and tried to thrust
them away. He denounced himself as a villain.
The Red Badge of Courage |
