| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Allan Quatermain by H. Rider Haggard: ascertained, the cause of it. Thus it came about that in attempting
to show off we had committed sacrilege of a most aggravated nature.
When our guide had finished his tale, the old man with the long
beard and round cap, whose appearance I have already described,
and who was, as I have said, the High Priest of the country,
and known by the name of Agon, rose and commenced an impassioned
harangue. I did not like the look of his cold grey eye as he
fixed it on us. I should have liked it still less had I known
that in the name of the outraged majesty of his god he was demanding
that the whole lot of us should be offered up as a sacrifice
by means of being burnt alive.
Allan Quatermain |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Silverado Squatters by Robert Louis Stevenson: we knew it not, for Silverado) the steamer jumped, and the
black buoys were dancing in the jabble; the ocean breeze blew
killing chill; and, although the upper sky was still
unflecked with vapour, the sea fogs were pouring in from
seaward, over the hilltops of Marin county, in one great,
shapeless, silver cloud.
South Vallejo is typical of many Californian towns. It was a
blunder; the site has proved untenable; and, although it is
still such a young place by the scale of Europe, it has
already begun to be deserted for its neighbour and namesake,
North Vallejo. A long pier, a number of drinking saloons, a
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Apology by Plato: if a person were to select the night in which his sleep was undisturbed
even by dreams, and were to compare with this the other days and nights of
his life, and then were to tell us how many days and nights he had passed
in the course of his life better and more pleasantly than this one, I think
that any man, I will not say a private man, but even the great king will
not find many such days or nights, when compared with the others. Now if
death be of such a nature, I say that to die is gain; for eternity is then
only a single night. But if death is the journey to another place, and
there, as men say, all the dead abide, what good, O my friends and judges,
can be greater than this? If indeed when the pilgrim arrives in the world
below, he is delivered from the professors of justice in this world, and
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