| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Ann Veronica by H. G. Wells: people going about the swarming spaces of London with their minds
full, their talk and gestures full, their very clothing charged
with the suggestion of the urgency of this pervasive project of
alteration. Some indeed carried themselves, dressed themselves
even, rather as foreign visitors from the land of "Looking
Backward" and "News from Nowhere" than as the indigenous
Londoners they were. For the most part these were detached
people: men practising the plastic arts, young writers, young men
in employment, a very large proportion of girls and women--self-
supporting women or girls of the student class. They made a
stratum into which Ann Veronica was now plunged up to her neck;
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy: establishment which existed for him there.
At this time -- the July preceding the September in
which we find at Greenhill Fair -- he fell in with a
travelling circus which was performing in the outskirts of
a northern town. Troy introduced himself to the
manager by taming a restive horse of the troupe, hitting
a suspended apple with pistol-- bullet fired from the
animal's back when in full gallop, and other feats. For
his merits in these -- all more or less based upon his ex-
periences as a dragoon-guardsman -- Troy was taken into
the company, and the play of Turpin was prepared with
Far From the Madding Crowd |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne by Robert Louis Stevenson: The position was unpleasantly exposed. One or two carts went by
upon the road; and as long as daylight lasted I concealed myself,
for all the world like a hunted Camisard, behind my fortification
of vast chestnut trunk; for I was passionately afraid of discovery
and the visit of jocular persons in the night. Moreover, I saw
that I must be early awake; for these chestnut gardens had been the
scene of industry no further gone than on the day before. The
slope was strewn with lopped branches, and here and there a great
package of leaves was propped against a trunk; for even the leaves
are serviceable, and the peasants use them in winter by way of
fodder for their animals. I picked a meal in fear and trembling,
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