| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe: knew she had got ready for me for my voyage.
When I gave the boatswain the letter, I gave him a shilling
with it, which I told him was for the charge of a messenger
or porter, which I entreated him to send with the letter as
soon as he came on shore, that if possible I might have an
answer brought back by the same hand, that I might know
what was become of my things; 'for sir,' says I, 'if the ship
should go away before I have them on board, I am undone.'
I took care, when I gave him the shilling, to let him see that
I had a little better furniture about me than the ordinary
prisoners, for he saw that I had a purse, and in it a pretty deal
Moll Flanders |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tales of the Klondyke by Jack London: the one hand stretched the barren snow-land; on the other, the
frozen sea. With neither food nor shelter, he could not run far.
All they had to do was to wait till he wandered back to the tent,
as he inevitably must, when the frost and hunger laid hold of him.
But these men did not stop to think. There was a certain taint of
madness running in the veins of all of them. Besides, blood had
been spilled, and upon them was the blood-lust, thick and hot.
"Vengeance is mine," saith the Lord, and He saith it in temperate
climes where the warm sun steals away the energies of men. But in
the Northland they have discovered that prayer is only efficacious
when backed by muscle, and they are accustomed to doing things for
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Virginian by Owen Wister: been upholstered, lavish with trophies of the frontier; and yet
it was in front of the miniature that the visitors used to stop.
Shining quietly now in the cabin's blackness this summer day, the
heirloom was presiding until the end. And as Molly Wood's eyes
fell upon her ancestress of Bennington, 1777, there flashed a
spark of steel in them, alone here in the room that she was
leaving forever. She was not going to teach school any more on
Bear Creek, Wyoming; she was going home to Bennington, Vermont.
When time came for school to open again, there should be a new
schoolmarm.
This was the momentous result of that visit which the Virginian
The Virginian |
