| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain: given fifty players present, thirty or thirty-five were likely
to be from the river. But I suspected that the ranks were thin now,
and the steamboatmen no longer an aristocracy. Why, in my time they
used to call the 'barkeep' Bill, or Joe, or Tom, and slap him on
the shoulder; I watched for that. But none of these people did it.
Manifestly a glory that once was had dissolved and vanished away in
these twenty-one years.
When I went up to my room, I found there the young man called Rogers, crying.
Rogers was not his name; neither was Jones, Brown, Dexter, Ferguson, Bascom,
nor Thompson; but he answered to either of these that a body found handy
in an emergency; or to any other name, in fact, if he perceived that you
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Eve and David by Honore de Balzac: he is weak of will, he cannot resist the allurements of pleasure,
nor forego the least of his ambitions. He is indolent, like all
who would fain be poets; he thinks it clever to juggle with the
difficulties of life instead of facing and overcoming them. He
will be brave at one time, cowardly at another, and deserves
neither credit for his courage, nor blame for his cowardice.
Lucien is like a harp with strings that are slackened or tightened
by the atmosphere. He might write a great book in a glad or angry
mood, and care nothing for the success that he had desired for so
long.
"When he first came to Paris he fell under the influence of an
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe: were very good meat. And now, in the managing my household
affairs, I found myself wanting in many things, which I thought at
first it was impossible for me to make; as, indeed, with some of
them it was: for instance, I could never make a cask to be hooped.
I had a small runlet or two, as I observed before; but I could
never arrive at the capacity of making one by them, though I spent
many weeks about it; I could neither put in the heads, or join the
staves so true to one another as to make them hold water; so I gave
that also over. In the next place, I was at a great loss for
candles; so that as soon as ever it was dark, which was generally
by seven o'clock, I was obliged to go to bed. I remembered the
Robinson Crusoe |
