| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift: old, be offered in sale to the persons of quality and fortune,
through the kingdom, always advising the mother to let them suck
plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump, and
fat for a good table. A child will make two dishes at an
entertainment for friends, and when the family dines alone, the
fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned
with a little pepper or salt, will be very good boiled on the
fourth day, especially in winter.
I have reckoned upon a medium, that a child just born will weigh
12 pounds, and in a solar year, if tolerably nursed, encreaseth
to 28 pounds.
A Modest Proposal |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from My Antonia by Willa Cather: were the only broken land in sight. Everywhere, as far as the eye
could reach, there was nothing but rough, shaggy, red grass,
most of it as tall as I.
North of the house, inside the ploughed fire-breaks, grew a thick-set strip
of box-elder trees, low and bushy, their leaves already turning yellow.
This hedge was nearly a quarter of a mile long, but I had to look very hard
to see it at all. The little trees were insignificant against the grass.
It seemed as if the grass were about to run over them, and over the plum-patch
behind the sod chicken-house.
As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water
is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour
My Antonia |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James: outside power laid hold of me, I found myself turning round and
almost running to my room, where I immediately got out all the
relics of her which I possessed, including some hair, all her
notes and letters and ambrotypes on glass. The former I made a
fire of, the latter I actually crushed beneath my heel, in a sort
of fierce joy of revenge and punishment. I now loathed and
despised her altogether, and as for myself I felt as if a load of
disease had suddenly been removed from me. That was the end. I
never spoke to her or wrote to her again in all the subsequent
years, and I have never had a single moment of loving thought
towards one for so many months entirely filled my heart. In
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