| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain: Whenever my missionaries overcame a knight errant
on the road they washed him, and when he got well
they swore him to go and get a bulletin-board and dis-
seminate soap and civilization the rest of his days. As
a consequence the workers in the field were increasing
by degrees, and the reform was steadily spreading.
My soap factory felt the strain early. At first I had
only two hands; but before I had left home I was
already employing fifteen, and running night and day;
and the atmospheric result was getting so pronounced
that the king went sort of fainting and gasping around
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Cruise of the Jasper B. by Don Marquis: swung round like live things; the whole ship from bowsprit to
rudder shook and trembled with the assault.
Cleggett, watchful at the wheel, prepared to turn her nose away
from the bank, but he was astonished to perceive that in spite of
her quaking and shivering the Jasper B. did not move one inch
forward from her position. He was prepared for a certain
stability on the part of the Jasper B., but not for quite so much
of it.
With the next gust the storm was on them in earnest. This blast
came with zigzag flashes of lightning that showed the heavens
riotous with battalions of charging clouds; it came with
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Iliad by Homer: returning home in their ships. As when some great forest fire is
raging upon a mountain top and its light is seen afar, even so as
they marched the gleam of their armour flashed up into the
firmament of heaven.
They were like great flocks of geese, or cranes, or swans on the
plain about the waters of Cayster, that wing their way hither and
thither, glorying in the pride of flight, and crying as they
settle till the fen is alive with their screaming. Even thus did
their tribes pour from ships and tents on to the plain of the
Scamander, and the ground rang as brass under the feet of men and
horses. They stood as thick upon the flower-bespangled field as
The Iliad |
