| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce: enforcing an erect carriage of the body. It did not appear
to be the duty of these two men to know what was occurring at
the center of the bridge; they merely blockaded the two ends
of the foot planking that traversed it.
Beyond one of the sentinels nobody was in sight; the railroad
ran straight away into a forest for a hundred yards, then,
curving, was lost to view. Doubtless there was an outpost
farther along. The other bank of the stream was open ground
-- a gentle slope topped with a stockade of vertical tree
trunks, loopholed for rifles, with a single embrasure
through which protruded the muzzle of a brass cannon
An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: true representative of God at the christening is the child itself.
But such posers are unpopular, because they imply that our little
customs, or, as we often call them, our religion, mean something, or
must originally have meant something, and that we understand and
believe that something.
However, my business is not to make confusion worse confounded, but to
clear it up. Only, it is as well to begin by a sample of current
thought and practice which shews that on the subject of children we
are very deeply confused. On the whole, whatever our theory or no
theory may be, our practice is to treat the child as the property of
its immediate physical parents, and to allow them to do what they like
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne by Robert Louis Stevenson: shaggy country at my feet has any title to the name, and in this
sense the peasantry employ the word. These are the Cevennes with
an emphasis: the Cevennes of the Cevennes. In that undecipherable
labyrinth of hills, a war of bandits, a war of wild beasts, raged
for two years between the Grand Monarch with all his troops and
marshals on the one hand, and a few thousand Protestant
mountaineers upon the other. A hundred and eighty years ago, the
Camisards held a station even on the Lozere, where I stood; they
had an organisation, arsenals, a military and religious hierarchy;
their affairs were 'the discourse of every coffee-house' in London;
England sent fleets in their support; their leaders prophesied and
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