| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: clear, amber-coloured stream, not more than ten or fifteen yards
wide, running swift and strong, over beds of sand and rounded
pebbles. The canoes went wallowing and plunging up the narrow
channel, between thick banks of alders, like clumsy sea-monsters.
All the grace with which they move under the strokes of the paddle,
in large waters, was gone. They looked uncouth and predatory, like
a pair of seals that I once saw swimming far up the river
Ristigouche in chase of fish. From the bow of each canoe the
landing-net stuck out as a symbol of destruction--after the fashion
of the Dutch admiral who nailed a broom to his masthead. But it
would have been impossible to sweep the trout out of that little
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Rescue by Joseph Conrad: triumphantly back to that country seen once at night under the
low clouds and in the incessant tumult of thunder. When at the
conclusion of some long talk with Hassim, who for the twentieth
time perhaps had related the story of his wrongs and his
struggle, he lifted his big arm and shaking his fist above his
head, shouted: "We will stir them up. We will wake up the
country!" he was, without knowing it in the least, making a
complete confession of the idealism hidden under the simplicity
of his strength. He would wake up the country! That was the
fundamental and unconscious emotion on which were engrafted his
need of action, the primitive sense of what was due to justice,
The Rescue |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Cromwell by William Shakespeare: SADLER.
Ho now, my Lords: what, is Lord Cromwell dead?
BEDFORD.
Lord Cromwell's body now doth want a head.
SADLER.
O God! a little speed had saved his life.
Here is a kind reprieve come from the king,
To bring him straight unto his majesty.
SUFFOLK.
Aye, aye, sir Ralph, reprieves comes now too late.
GARDINER.
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