| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll: take the more prosaic course of simply explaining how it happened.
The Bellman, who was almost morbidly sensitive about appearances,
used to have the bowsprit unshipped once or twice a week to be revarnished,
and it more than once happened, when the time came for replacing it, that
no one on board could remember which end of the ship it belonged to.
They knew it was not of the slightest use to appeal to the Bellman about it--
he would only refer to his Naval Code, and read out in pathetic tones
Admiralty Instructions which none of them had ever been able to understand--
so it generally ended in its being fastened on, anyhow, across the rudder.
The helmsman used to stand by with tears in his eyes; he knew it was all wrong,
but alas! Rule 42 of the Code, "No one shall speak to the Man at the Helm,"
The Hunting of the Snark |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Message by Honore de Balzac: not know, but the coach fell over upon him, and he was crushed
under it.
We carried him into a peasant's cottage, and there, amid the
moans wrung from him by horrible sufferings, he contrived to give
me a commission--a sacred task, in that it was laid upon me by a
dying man's last wish. Poor boy, all through his agony he was
torturing himself in his young simplicity of heart with the
thought of the painful shock to his mistress when she should
suddenly read of his death in a newspaper. He begged me to go
myself to break the news to her. He bade me look for a key which
he wore on a ribbon about his neck. I found it half buried in the
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Davis: has lain dumb for centuries: I want to make it a real thing to
you. You, Egoist, or Pantheist, or Arminian, busy in making
straight paths for your feet on the hills, do not see it
clearly,--this terrible question which men here have gone mad
and died trying to answer. I dare not put this secret into
words. I told you it was dumb. These men, going by with
drunken faces and brains full of unawakened power, do not ask it
of Society or of God. Their lives ask it; their deaths ask it.
There is no reply. I will tell you plainly that I have a great
hope; and I bring it to you to be tested. It is this: that
this terrible dumb question is its own reply; that it is not the
Life in the Iron-Mills |
