| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from My Bondage and My Freedom by Frederick Douglass: it is illustrative of a phase of slavery to which I have already
referred in another connection. Besides two other coachmen, Col.
Lloyd owned one named William, who, strangely enough, was often
called by his surname, Wilks, by white and colored people on the
home plantation. Wilks was a very fine looking man. He was
about as white as anybody on the plantation; and in manliness of
form, and comeliness of features, he bore a very striking
resemblance to Mr. Murray Lloyd. It was whispered, and pretty
generally admitted as a fact, that William Wilks was a son of
Col. Lloyd, by a highly favored slave-woman, who was still on the
plantation. There were many reasons for believing this whisper,
My Bondage and My Freedom |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Summer by Edith Wharton: it was! And what would she have to say when she reached
Him?
Charity's bewildered brain laboured with the attempt to
picture her mother's past, and to relate it in any
way to the designs of a just but merciful God; but it
was impossible to imagine any link between them. She
herself felt as remote from the poor creature she had
seen lowered into her hastily dug grave as if the
height of the heavens divided them. She had seen
poverty and misfortune in her life; but in a community
where poor thrifty Mrs. Hawes and the industrious Ally
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Animal Farm by George Orwell: for the windmill. Then there were lamp oil and candles for the house,
sugar for Napoleon's own table (he forbade this to the other pigs, on the
ground that it made them fat), and all the usual replacements such as
tools, nails, string, coal, wire, scrap-iron, and dog biscuits. A stump of
hay and part of the potato crop were sold off, and the contract for eggs
was increased to six hundred a week, so that that year the hens barely
hatched enough chicks to keep their numbers at the same level. Rations,
reduced in December, were reduced again in February, and lanterns in the
stalls were forbidden to save oil. But the pigs seemed comfortable enough,
and in fact were putting on weight if anything. One afternoon in late
February a warm, rich, appetising scent, such as the animals had never
Animal Farm |
