| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Road to Oz by L. Frank Baum: once with my friends the Scarecrow, and the Tin Woodman, and the
Cowardly Lion, to fight a wicked witch who had made all the Winkies
her slaves."
"Did you conquer her?" asked Polly.
"Why, I melted her with a bucket of water, and that was the end of
her," replied Dorothy. "After that the people were free, you know,
and they made Nick Chopper--that's the Tin Woodman--their Emp'ror."
"What's that?" asked Button-Bright.
"Emp'ror? Oh, it's something like an alderman, I guess."
"Oh," said the boy.
"But I thought Princess Ozma ruled Oz," said the shaggy man.
The Road to Oz |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tom Sawyer Abroad by Mark Twain: reckon."
"Well," he says, "this Desert is about the shape
of the United States, and if you was to lay it down on
top of the United States, it would cover the land of
the free out of sight like a blanket. There'd be a little
corner sticking out, up at Maine and away up north-
west, and Florida sticking out like a turtle's tail, and
that's all. We've took California away from the
Mexicans two or three years ago, so that part of the
Pacific coast is ours now, and if you laid the Great
Sahara down with her edge on the Pacific, she would
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad: left to write about it is not, perhaps, the most enviable fate; but
the point is that this impression resumes in its intensity the
whole recollection of days and days of desperately dangerous
weather. We were then, for reasons which it is not worth while to
specify, in the close neighbourhood of Kerguelen Land; and now,
when I open an atlas and look at the tiny dots on the map of the
Southern Ocean, I see as if engraved upon the paper the enraged
physiognomy of that gale.
Another, strangely, recalls a silent man. And yet it was not din
that was wanting; in fact, it was terrific. That one was a gale
that came upon the ship swiftly, like a parnpero, which last is a
The Mirror of the Sea |
