| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Wrecker by Stevenson & Osbourne: Such particularity might have been possible for several officers
and a draft of men from a ship of war, accompanied by an
experienced secretary with a knowledge of shorthand. For two
plain human beings, unaccustomed to the use of the broad-axe
and consumed with an impatient greed of the result, the whole
business melts, in the retrospect, into a nightmare of exertion,
heat, hurry, and bewilderment; sweat pouring from the face like
rain, the scurry of rats, the choking exhalations of the bilge, and
the throbs and splinterings of the toiling axes. I shall content
myself with giving the cream of our discoveries in a logical
rather than a temporal order; though the two indeed practically
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Dead Souls by Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol: horses were not shod, she had set off for the town, in order to learn
at first hand how the dead souls were faring, and whether (which might
God forfend!) she had not sold them at something like a third of their
true value. The consequences of her venture the reader will learn from
a conversation between two ladies. We will reserve it for the ensuing
chapter.
CHAPTER IX
Next morning, before the usual hour for paying calls, there tripped
from the portals of an orange-coloured wooden house with an attic
storey and a row of blue pillars a lady in an elegant plaid cloak.
With her came a footman in a many-caped greatcoat and a polished top
Dead Souls |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Tanach: Exodus 1: 19 And the midwives said unto Pharaoh: 'Because the Hebrew women are not as the Egyptian women; for they are lively, and are delivered ere the midwife come unto them.'
Exodus 1: 20 And God dealt well with the midwives; and the people multiplied, and waxed very mighty.
Exodus 1: 21 And it came to pass, because the midwives feared God, that He made them houses.
Exodus 1: 22 And Pharaoh charged all his people, saying: 'Every son that is born ye shall cast into the river, and every daughter ye shall save alive.'
Exodus 2: 1 And there went a man of the house of Levi, and took to wife a daughter of Levi.
Exodus 2: 2 And the woman conceived, and bore a son; and when she saw him that he was a goodly child, she hid him three months.
Exodus 2: 3 And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch; and she put the child therein, and laid it in the flags by the river's brink.
Exodus 2: 4 And his sister stood afar off, to know what would be done to him.
Exodus 2: 5 And the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe in the river; and her maidens walked along by the river-side; and she saw the ark among the flags, and sent her handmaid to fetch it.
Exodus 2: 6 And she opened it, and saw it, even the child; and behold a boy that wept. And she had compassion on him, and said: 'This is one of the Hebrews' children.'
The Tanach |
