| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain: XVII I put a "Calendar" remark concerning July the Fourth,
and began the chapter with this statistic:
"Rowena went out in the backyard after supper to see the
fireworks and fell down the well and got drowned."
It seemed abrupt, but I thought maybe the reader wouldn't notice it,
because I changed the subject right away to something else.
Anyway it loosened up Rowena from where she was stuck and
got her out of the way, and that was the main thing. It seemed a
prompt good way of weeding out people that had got stalled, and a
plenty good enough way for those others; so I hunted up the two
boys and said, "They went out back one night to stone the cat and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Master and Man by Leo Tolstoy: him and opened his eyes. It was daylight; the wind was
whistling as before between the shafts, and the snow was
falling in the same way, except that it was no longer driving
against the frame of the sledge but silently covered both
sledge and horse deeper and deeper, and neither the horse's
movements nor his breathing were any longer to be heard.
'He must have frozen too,' thought Nikita of Mukhorty, and
indeed those hoof knocks against the sledge, which had awakened
Nikita, were the last efforts the already numbed Mukhorty had
made to keep on his feet before dying.
'O Lord God, it seems Thou art calling me too!' said Nikita.
Master and Man |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from 1984 by George Orwell: the streets was going on as though nothing had happened. It was nearly
twenty hours, and the drinking-shops which the proles frequented ('pubs',
they called them) were choked with customers. From their grimy swing doors,
endlessly opening and shutting, there came forth a smell of urine, sawdust,
and sour beer. In an angle formed by a projecting house-front three men
were standing very close together, the middle one of them holding a
folded-up newspaper which the other two were studying over his shoulder.
Even before he was near enough to make out the expression on their faces,
Winston could see absorption in every line of their bodies. It was
obviously some serious piece of news that they were reading. He was a few
paces away from them when suddenly the group broke up and two of the men
1984 |
