| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Jungle by Upton Sinclair: It was all so very businesslike that one watched it fascinated. It was
porkmaking by machinery, porkmaking by applied mathematics. And yet
somehow the most matter-of-fact person could not help thinking of the
hogs; they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly; and they were
so very human in their protests--and so perfectly within their rights!
They had done nothing to deserve it; and it was adding insult to injury,
as the thing was done here, swinging them up in this cold-blooded,
impersonal way, without a pretense of apology, without the homage of
a tear. Now and then a visitor wept, to be sure; but this slaughtering
machine ran on, visitors or no visitors. It was like some horrible crime
committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Life of the Spider by J. Henri Fabre: The Epeira complies to the best of her ability with this law of the
endless volute. The spiral revolutions come closer together as
they approach the pole. At a given distance, they stop abruptly;
but, at this point, the auxiliary spiral, which is not destroyed in
the central region, takes up the thread; and we see it, not without
some surprise, draw nearer to the pole in ever-narrowing and
scarcely perceptible circles. There is not, of course, absolute
mathematical accuracy, but a very close approximation to that
accuracy. The Epeira winds nearer and nearer round her pole, so
far as her equipment, which, like our own, is defective, will allow
her. One would believe her to be thoroughly versed in the laws of
The Life of the Spider |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf: "Let's go," he said, repeating her words, clicking them out, however, with
a self-consciousness that made her wince. "Let us all go to the circus."
No. He could not say it right. He could not feel it right. But why not?
she wondered. What was wrong with him then? She liked him warmly, at the
moment. Had they not been taken, she asked, to circuses when they were
children? Never, he answered, as if she asked the very thing he wanted;
had been longing all these days to say, how they did not go to circuses.
It was a large family, nine brothers and sisters, and his father was a
working man. "My father is a chemist, Mrs Ramsay. He keeps a shop." He
himself had paid his own way since he was thirteen. Often he went without
a greatcoat in winter. He could never "return hospitality" (those were
To the Lighthouse |
