| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbot: you would listen to reason. You ask me to believe that there is
another Line besides that which my senses indicate, and another motion
besides that of which I am daily conscious. I, in return,
ask you to describe in words or indicate by motion that other Line
of which you speak. Instead of moving, you merely exercise
some magic art of vanishing and returning to sight; and instead of
any lucid description of your new World, you simply tell me
the numbers and sizes of some forty of my retinue, facts known
to any child in my capital. Can anything be more irrational
or audacious? Acknowledge your folly or depart from my dominions."
Furious at his perversity, and especially indignant that he professed
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Main Street by Sinclair Lewis: had found rust in the barrel of his pump-gun. But at the
highest he was to her another Hugh, without the glamor of
Hugh's unknown future.
There was, late in June, a day of heat-lightning.
Because of the work imposed by the absence of the other
doctors the Kennicotts had not moved to the lake cottage
but remained in town, dusty and irritable. In the afternoon,
when she went to Oleson & McGuire's (formerly Dahl &
Oleson's), Carol was vexed by the assumption of the youthful
clerk, recently come from the farm, that he had to be
neighborly and rude. He was no more brusquely familiar than
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson: love when in truth they were only idle. Their affection was not
fixed on sense or virtue, and therefore seldom ended but in
vexation. Their grief, however, like their joy, was transient;
everything floated in their mind unconnected with the past or
future, so that one desire easily gave way to another, as a second
stone, cast into the water, effaces and confounds the circles of
the first.
With these girls she played as with inoffensive animals, and found
them proud of her countenance and weary of her company.
But her purpose was to examine more deeply, and her affability
easily persuaded the hearts that were swelling with sorrow to
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