| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Extracts From Adam's Diary by Mark Twain: main part of its person to stick up uncomfortably high in the air,
and this is not attractive. It is built much as we are, but its
method of travelling shows that it is not of our breed. The short
front legs and long hind ones indicate that it is of the kangaroo
family, but it is a marked variation of the species, since the
true kangaroo hops, whereas this one never does. Still, it is a
curious and interesting variety, and has not been catalogued before.
As I discovered it, I have felt justified in securing the credit
of the discovery by attaching my name to it, and hence have called
it Kangaroorum Adamiensis. ... It must have been a young one
when it came, for it has grown exceedingly since. It must be five
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe: carried anything out, the justice was inclined to have released
me; but the first saucy jade that stopped me, affirming that I
was going out with the goods, but that she stopped me and
pulled me back as I was upon the threshold, the justice upon
that point committed me, and I was carried to Newgate. That
horrid place! my very blood chills at the mention of its name;
the place where so many of my comrades had been locked up,
and from whence they went to the fatal tree; the place where
my mother suffered so deeply, where I was brought into the
world, and from whence I expected no redemption but by an
infamous death: to conclude, the place that had so long
Moll Flanders |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne: some wild, highland rivulet, tumbling down from its birthplace in
the upper mountain region, had been caught and tamed by human
cunning, and compelled to turn the machinery of cotton-factories.
The inhabitants of this valley, in short, were numerous, and of
many modes of life. But all of them, grown people and children,
had a kind of familiarity with the Great Stone Face, although
some possessed the gift of distinguishing this grand natural
phenomenon more perfectly than many of their neighbors.
The Great Stone Face, then, was a work of Nature in her mood of
majestic playfulness, formed on the perpendicular side of a
mountain by some immense rocks, which had been thrown together in
The Snow Image |
