| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Crisis in Russia by Arthur Ransome: for one neighbor to steal the chickens of the other. These
town workers of a district for the most part agricultural were
very sure that the most urgent of all tasks was to raise
industry to the point at which the town would really be able
to supply the village with its needs.
Larin and Radek severally summed up and made final
attacks on each other's positions, after which Radek's
resolution approving the theses of the Central Committee
was passed almost unanimously. Larin's four amendments
received 1, 3, 7 and 1 vote apiece. This result was received
with cheering throughout the theater, and showed the
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: might make a figure if he were to praise the Athenians among the Athenians.
MENEXENUS: And what would you be able to say if you had to speak?
SOCRATES: Of my own wit, most likely nothing; but yesterday I heard
Aspasia composing a funeral oration about these very dead. For she had
been told, as you were saying, that the Athenians were going to choose a
speaker, and she repeated to me the sort of speech which he should deliver,
partly improvising and partly from previous thought, putting together
fragments of the funeral oration which Pericles spoke, but which, as I
believe, she composed.
MENEXENUS: And can you remember what Aspasia said?
SOCRATES: I ought to be able, for she taught me, and she was ready to
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: new branch of literature opens to my view: a drama in which people
begin in a poor way and end, after getting gradually happier, in an
ecstasy of enjoyment. The common novel is not the thing at all.
It gives struggle followed by relief. I want each act to close on
a new and triumphant happiness, which has been steadily growing all
the while. This is the real antithesis of tragedy, where things
get blacker and blacker and end in hopeless woe. Smiles has not
grasped my grand idea, and only shows a bitter struggle followed by
a little respite before death. Some feeble critic might say my new
idea was not true to nature. I'm sick of this old-fashioned notion
of art. Hold a mirror up, indeed! Let's paint a picture of how
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