| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Emma McChesney & Co. by Edna Ferber: You see, a compartment always will spell luxury to me. There
were all those years on the road, you know, when I often
considered myself in luck to get an upper on a local of a branch
line that threw you around in your berth like a bean in a tin can
every time the engineer stopped or started."
Buck looked at his watch, then stooped in farewell. Quite
suddenly they did not want to part. They had grown curiously
used to each other, these two. Emma found herself clinging to
this man with the tender eyes, and Buck held her close,
regardless of train-schedules. Emma rushed him to the platform
and watched him, wide-eyed, as he swung off the slowly moving
Emma McChesney & Co. |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Voyage of the Beagle by Charles Darwin: of Fernando Noronha. The highest point is only fifty feet above
the level of the sea, and the entire circumference is under
three-quarters of a mile. This small point rises abruptly out
of the depths of the ocean. Its mineralogical constitution
is not simple; in some parts the rock is of a cherty, in others
of a felspathic nature, including thin veins of serpentine. It
is a remarkable fact, that all the many small islands, lying
far from any continent, in the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic
Oceans, with the exception of the Seychelles and this little
point of rock, are, I believe, composed either of coral or of
erupted matter. The volcanic nature of these oceanic islands
The Voyage of the Beagle |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Walden by Henry David Thoreau: It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the
depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees next the shore are
the slender eyelashes which fringe it, and the wooded hills and
cliffs around are its overhanging brows.
Standing on the smooth sandy beach at the east end of the pond,
in a calm September afternoon, when a slight haze makes the opposite
shore-line indistinct, I have seen whence came the expression, "the
glassy surface of a lake." When you invert your head, it looks like
a thread of finest gossamer stretched across the valley, and
gleaming against the distant pine woods, separating one stratum of
the atmosphere from another. You would think that you could walk
Walden |
