| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Master and Man by Leo Tolstoy: frozen, and his open mouth under his clipped moustache was full
of snow. But Nikita though chilled through was still alive.
When he had been brought to, he felt sure that he was already
dead and that what was taking place with him was no longer
happening in this world but in the next. When he heard the
peasants shouting as they dug him out and rolled the frozen
body of Vasili Andreevich from off him, he was at first
surprised that in the other world peasants should be shouting
in the same old way and had the same kind of body, and then
when he realized that he was still in this world he was sorry
rather than glad, especially when he found that the toes on
Master and Man |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg by Mark Twain: nineteen couples were surprised and indignant.
Billson and Wilson turned and stared at each other. Billson asked,
bitingly:
"Why do YOU rise, Mr. Wilson?"
"Because I have a right to. Perhaps you will be good enough to
explain to the house why YOU rise."
"With great pleasure. Because I wrote that paper."
"It is an impudent falsity! I wrote it myself."
It was Burgess's turn to be paralysed. He stood looking vacantly at
first one of the men and then the other, and did not seem to know
what to do. The house was stupefied. Lawyer Wilson spoke up now,
The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: superior classes of being, such as angels and spirits--'tis all done, may
it please your worships, as they tell me, by Intuition;--and beings
inferior, as your worships all know--syllogize by their noses: though
there is an island swimming in the sea (though not altogether at its ease)
whose inhabitants, if my intelligence deceives me not, are so wonderfully
gifted, as to syllogize after the same fashion, and oft-times to make very
well out too:--but that's neither here nor there--
The gift of doing it as it should be, amongst us, or--the great and
principal act of ratiocination in man, as logicians tell us, is the finding
out the agreement or disagreement of two ideas one with another, by the
intervention of a third (called the medius terminus); just as a man, as
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