| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Faith of Men by Jack London: the winter was yet young when he began to realize the added
reasons, with such an assistant, that the previous agent had found
to impel his own hand against his life.
It was very lonely at Twenty Mile. The bleak vastness stretched
away on every side to the horizon. The snow, which was really
frost, flung its mantle over the land and buried everything in the
silence of death. For days it was clear and cold, the thermometer
steadily recording forty to fifty degrees below zero. Then a
change came over the face of things. What little moisture had
oozed into the atmosphere gathered into dull grey, formless clouds;
it became quite warm, the thermometer rising to twenty below; and
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Wrecker by Stevenson & Osbourne: it is my lookout; and there's no man born that's going to give
me lessons.' Well, there was plenty dirt on board that Maria
first and last. Of course, the old man put my back up, and, of
course, he put up the crew's; and I had to regular fight my way
through every watch. The men got to hate me, so's I would
hear them grit their teeth when I came up. At last, one day, I
saw a big hulking beast of a Dutchman booting the ship's boy.
I made one shoot of it off the house and laid that Dutchman
out. Up he came, and I laid him out again. 'Now,' I said, 'if
there's a kick left in you, just mention it, and I'll stamp your
ribs in like a packing-case.' He thought better of it, and never
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson: temptations of public life, and if he cannot conquer he may
properly retreat. Some have little power to do good, and have
likewise little strength to resist evil. Many are weary of the
conflicts with adversity, and are willing to eject those passions
which have long busied them in vain. And many are dismissed by age
and diseases from the more laborious duties of society. In
monasteries the weak and timorous may be happily sheltered, the
weary may repose, and the penitent may meditate. Those retreats of
prayer and contemplation have something so congenial to the mind of
man, that perhaps there is scarcely one that does not purpose to
close his life in pious abstraction, with a few associates serious
|
