| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from When the World Shook by H. Rider Haggard: the earth in some past geological age, all life must have been
destroyed by them and their remains ought to exist at the bottom
of the holes. To me they look more like the effect of high
explosives, but that, of course, is impossible, though I don't
know what else could have caused such craters."
Then he went back to his work, for nothing that had to do with
antiquity interested Bickley very much. The present and its
problems were enough for him, he would say, who neither had lived
in the past nor expected to have any share in the future.
As I remained curious I made an opportunity to scramble to the
bottom of one of these craters, taking with me some of the
When the World Shook |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Europeans by Henry James: a house. Felix was positively amused at having a house of his own;
for the little white cottage among the apple-trees--the chalet,
as Madame Munster always called it--was much more sensibly his own than
any domiciliary quatrieme, looking upon a court, with the rent overdue.
Felix had spent a good deal of his life in looking into courts,
with a perhaps slightly tattered pair of elbows resting upon the ledge
of a high-perched window, and the thin smoke of a cigarette rising
into an atmosphere in which street-cries died away and the vibration
of chimes from ancient belfries became sensible. He had never
known anything so infinitely rural as these New England fields;
and he took a great fancy to all their pastoral roughnesses.
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Vailima Letters by Robert Louis Stevenson: he slept well all night for a benediction. This lunatic
asylum exercise has no attractions for any of us.
I don't know if I remembered to say how much pleased I was
with ACROSS THE PLAINS in every way, inside and out, and you
and me. The critics seem to taste it, too, as well as could
be hoped, and I believe it will continue to bring me in a few
shillings a year for a while. But such books pay only
indirectly.
To understand the full horror of the mad scene, and how well
my boys behaved, remember that THEY BELIEVED P.'S RAVINGS,
they KNEW that his dead family, thirty strong, crowded the
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