| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Young Forester by Zane Grey: a few rods, I decided to return to camp and cook breakfast before going any
farther. While I was at it I cut many thin slices of venison, and, after
roasting them, I stored them away in the capacious pocket of my coat.
My breakfast finished, I again set out to see what had become of the
remains of the deer. In two or three places the sharp hoofs had cut lines
in the soft earth, and there were tufts of whitish-gray hair elsewhere. A
hundred yards or more down the hollow I came to a bare spot where recently
there had been a pool of water. Here I found cat tracks as large as my two
hands. I had never seen the track of a mountain-lion, but, all the same, I
knew that this was the real thing. What an enormous brute he must have
been! I cast fearful glances into the surrounding thickets.
The Young Forester |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Odyssey by Homer: wide heaven. And if we may yet reach Ithaca, our own
country, forthwith will we rear a rich shrine to Helios
Hyperion, and therein would we set many a choice offering.
But if he be somewhat wroth for his cattle with straight
horns, and is fain to wreck our ship, and the other gods
follow his desire, rather with one gulp at the wave would I
cast my life away, than be slowly straitened to death in a
desert isle."
'So spake Eurylochus, and the rest of the company consented
thereto. Forthwith they drave off the best of the kine of
Helios that were nigh at hand, for the fair kine of
The Odyssey |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx: purpose of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old; it
served the purpose of exaggerating to the imagination the given task,
not to recoil before its practical solution; it served the purpose of
rekindling the revolutionary spirit, not to trot out its ghost.
In 1848-51 only the ghost of the old revolution wandered about, from
Marrast the "Relpublicain en gaunts jaunes," [#1 Silk-stocking
republican] who disguised himself in old Bailly, down to the adventurer,
who hid his repulsively trivial features under the iron death mask of
Napoleon. A whole people, that imagines it has imparted to itself
accelerated powers of motion through a revolution, suddenly finds itself
transferred back to a dead epoch, and, lest there be any mistake
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