| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Off on a Comet by Jules Verne: which he performed with exemplary perseverance.
Day and night, with the shortest possible intervals of rest,
despite wind, rain, and storm, he mounted guard upon the cliff--
but all in vain. Not a speck appeared upon the desolate horizon.
To say the truth, no vessel could have stood against the weather.
The hurricane raged with tremendous fury, and the waves rose to a
height that seemed to defy calculation. Never, even in the second
era of creation, when, under the influence of internal heat,
the waters rose in vapor to descend in deluge back upon
the world, could meteorological phenomena have been developed
with more impressive intensity.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Maggie: A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane: into a roar of conversation, their hearts still kindling from the
glowings of the stage.
The pavements became tossing seas of umbrellas. Men stepped
forth to hail cabs or cars, raising their fingers in varied forms
of polite request or imperative demand. An endless procession
wended toward elevated stations. An atmosphere of pleasure and
prosperity seemed to hang over the throng, born, perhaps, of good
clothes and of having just emerged from a place of forgetfulness.
In the mingled light and gloom of an adjacent park,
a handful of wet wanderers, in attitudes of chronic dejection,
was scattered among the benches.
Maggie: A Girl of the Streets |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Salammbo by Gustave Flaubert: disturbed with anxiety. They wished at once to convince themselves of
his death and to participate in it. At last three Samnite shepherds
discovered him at a distance of fifteen paces from the spot where
Matho's tent lately stood. They recognised him by his long beard and
they called the rest.
Stretched on his back, his arms against his hips, and his knees close
together, he looked like a dead man laid out for the tomb.
Nevertheless his wasted sides rose and fell, and his eyes, wide-opened
in his pallid face, gazed in a continuous and intolerable fashion.
The Barbarians looked at him at first with great astonishment. Since
he had been living in the pit he had been almost forgotten; rendered
Salammbo |
