| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Animal Farm by George Orwell: the Cowshed by means of a stratagem, but had been openly fighting on
Jones's side. In fact, it was he who had actually been the leader of the
human forces, and had charged into battle with the words "Long live
Humanity!" on his lips. The wounds on Snowball's back, which a few of the
animals still remembered to have seen, had been inflicted by Napoleon's
teeth.
In the middle of the summer Moses the raven suddenly reappeared on the
farm, after an absence of several years. He was quite unchanged, still did
no work, and talked in the same strain as ever about Sugarcandy Mountain.
He would perch on a stump, flap his black wings, and talk by the hour to
anyone who would listen. "Up there, comrades," he would say solemnly,
Animal Farm |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato: the most critical period in the history of language is the transition from
verse to prose. At first mankind were contented to express their thoughts
in a set form of words having a kind of rhythm; to which regularity was
given by accent and quantity. But after a time they demanded a greater
degree of freedom, and to those who had all their life been hearing poetry
the first introduction of prose had the charm of novelty. The prose
romances into which the Homeric Poems were converted, for a while probably
gave more delight to the hearers or readers of them than the Poems
themselves, and in time the relation of the two was reversed: the poems
which had once been a necessity of the human mind became a luxury: they
were now superseded by prose, which in all succeeding ages became the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Wrecker by Stevenson & Osbourne: the wheel himself.
Johnson nodded, wiped his eyes with the back of his wet hand,
watched a chance as the vessel lunged up hill, and got to the
main rigging, where he swarmed aloft. Up and up, I watched
him go, hanging on at every ugly plunge, gaining with every
lull of the schooner's movement, until, clambering into the
cross-trees and clinging with one arm around the masts, I could
see him take one comprehensive sweep of the southwesterly
horizon. The next moment, he had slid down the backstay and
stood on deck, with a grin, a nod, and a gesture of the finger
that said "yes"; the next again, and he was back sweating and
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