| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll: as Alice was getting quite exhausted, they stopped, and she found
herself sitting on the ground, breathless and giddy.
The Queen propped her up against a tree, and said kindly, `You
may rest a little now.'
Alice looked round her in great surprise. `Why, I do believe
we've been under this tree the whole time! Everything's just as
it was!'
`Of course it is,' said the Queen, `what would you have it?'
`Well, in OUR country,' said Alice, still panting a little,
`you'd generally get to somewhere else--if you ran very fast
for a long time, as we've been doing.'
Through the Looking-Glass |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Illustrious Gaudissart by Honore de Balzac: attention and proclaimed the great talents of this perambulating
prospectus so loudly in the sphere of exalted banking and commercial
diplomacy, that the financial managers of two newspapers (celebrated
at that time but since defunct) were seized with the idea of employing
him to get subscribers. The proprietors of the "Globe," an organ of
Saint-Simonism, and the "Movement," a republican journal, each invited
the illustrious Gaudissart to a conference, and proposed to give him
ten francs a head for every subscriber, provided he brought in a
thousand, but only five francs if he got no more than five hundred.
The cause of political journalism not interfering with the pre-
accepted cause of life insurance, the bargain was struck; although
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: experiments, and hence its singular success. I am refreshed and
expanded when the freight train rattles past me, and I smell the
stores which go dispensing their odors all the way from Long Wharf
to Lake Champlain, reminding me of foreign parts, of coral reefs,
and Indian oceans, and tropical climes, and the extent of the globe.
I feel more like a citizen of the world at the sight of the
palm-leaf which will cover so many flaxen New England heads the next
summer, the Manilla hemp and cocoanut husks, the old junk, gunny
bags, scrap iron, and rusty nails. This carload of torn sails is
more legible and interesting now than if they should be wrought into
paper and printed books. Who can write so graphically the history
Walden |
