| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Dracula by Bram Stoker: rocks of the strand. I believe we should have shocked the `New Woman'
with our appetites. Men are more tolerant, bless them!
Then we walked home with some, or rather many, stoppages to rest,
and with our hearts full of a constant dread of wild bulls.
Lucy was really tired, and we intended to creep off
to bed as soon as we could. The young curate came in,
however, and Mrs. Westenra asked him to stay for supper.
Lucy and I had both a fight for it with the dusty miller.
I know it was a hard fight on my part, and I am quite heroic.
I think that some day the bishops must get together and see
about breeding up a new class of curates, who don't take supper,
Dracula |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Moby Dick by Herman Melville: legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships
once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes.
There you stand, lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing
ruffled but the waves. The tranced ship indolently rolls; the drowsy
trade winds blow; everything resolves you into languor. For the most
part, in this tropic whaling life, a sublime uneventfulness invests
you; you hear no news; read no gazettes; extras with startling
accounts of commonplaces never delude you into unnecessary
excitements; you hear of no domestic afflictions; bankrupt
securities; fall of stocks; are never troubled with the thought of
what you shall have for dinner--for all your meals for three years
Moby Dick |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln: that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated. . .
can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war.
We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place
for those who here gave their lives that this nation might live.
It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate. . .we cannot consecrate. . .
we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead,
who struggled here have consecrated it, far above our poor power
to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember,
what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.
It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished
|
