| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving: interrupted by the appearance of a negro in tow-cloth jacket and
trowsers. a round-crowned fragment of a hat, like the cap of
Mercury, and mounted on the back of a ragged, wild, half-broken
colt, which he managed with a rope by way of halter. He came
clattering up to the school-door with an invitation to Ichabod to
attend a merry - making or "quilting-frolic," to be held that
evening at Mynheer Van Tassel's; and having, delivered his
message with that air of importance and effort at fine language
which a negro is apt to display on petty embassies of the kind,
he dashed over the brook, and was seen scampering, away up the
Hollow, full of the importance and hurry of his mission.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Dust by Mr. And Mrs. Haldeman-Julius: life, anyway? Why didn't he learn that it's only a lot of
senseless pain? Every moment of it pain--from coming into the
world to going out. Oh, Bill, why didn't you learn what I know?
You had brains, boy, but it would have been better if you had
never used them. I've brains, too, but I've always managed to
keep them tied down--buckled to the farm, to investments, and
work--thinking about things that make us forget life. It's all
dust and dust, with rain once in a while, only the rain steams
off and it's dust again."
Martin began to review the course of his own past, and smiled
bitterly. Others were able to live the same kind of an existence,
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: would tell you that there was a dreadful infection in London so many years ago,
in which, as above, there died twenty thousand in a week, &c., just as we have
had it reported in London that there was a plague in the city of Naples
in the year 1656, in which there died 20,000 people in a day, of which
I have had very good satisfaction that it was utterly false.
But these extravagant reports were very prejudicial to our trade, as
well as unjust and injurious in themselves, for it was a long time after
the plague was quite over before our trade could recover itself in those
parts of the world; and the Flemings and Dutch (but especially the
last) made very great advantages of it, having all the market to
themselves, and even buying our manufactures in several parts of
A Journal of the Plague Year |
