| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: we read story-books in childhood, not for eloquence or character or
thought, but for some quality of the brute incident. That quality
was not mere bloodshed or wonder. Although each of these was
welcome in its place, the charm for the sake of which we read
depended on something different from either. My elders used to
read novels aloud; and I can still remember four different passages
which I heard, before I was ten, with the same keen and lasting
pleasure. One I discovered long afterwards to be the admirable
opening of WHAT WILL HE DO WITH IT: it was no wonder I was pleased
with that. The other three still remain unidentified. One is a
little vague; it was about a dark, tall house at night, and people
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: battle, but there was plenty of "roughing it," and occasionally
real hardship, as when the men were obliged to go for three days
without food. The volunteers had not enlisted for any definite
length of time, and seeing no prospect of fighting, they soon
became clamorous to return home. Accordingly his and other
companies were mustered out of service on May 27, at the mouth of
Fox River. At the same time the governor, not wishing to weaken
his forces before the arrival of other soldiers to take their
places, called for volunteers to remain twenty days longer.
Lincoln had gone to the frontier to do real service, not for the
glory of being captain. Accordingly, on the day on which he was
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar by Edgar Rice Burroughs: One moment they were laughing and talking together--the
next they lay stretched in death upon the trail, three
mighty engines of destruction bending over them.
Tarzan removed their outer garments as he had removed
those of his first victim, and again retired with Chulk
and Taglat to the greater seclusion of the tree they
had first selected.
Here the ape-man arranged the garments upon his shaggy
fellows and himself, until, at a distance, it might
have appeared that three white-robed Arabs squatted
silently among the branches of the forest.
Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar |
