| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Lone Star Ranger by Zane Grey: totally unfamiliar country. While he passed on, however, he
exercised such keen observation that in the future he would
know whatever might be of service to him if he chanced that way
again.
The rough, wild, brush-covered slope down from the foothills
gradually leveled out into plain, a magnificent grazing
country, upon which till noon of that day Duane did not see a
herd of cattle or a ranch. About that time he made out smoke
from the railroad, and after a couple of hours' riding he
entered a town which inquiry discovered to be Bradford. It was
the largest town he had visited since Marfa, and he calculated
The Lone Star Ranger |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Tess of the d'Urbervilles, A Pure Woman by Thomas Hardy: Nettlecombe-Tout, Dogbury, High Stoy, and Bubb Down.
The traveller from the coast, who, after plodding
northward for a score of miles over calcareous downs
and corn-lands, suddenly reaches the verge of one of
these escarpments, is surprised and delighted to
behold, extended like a map beneath him, a country
differing absolutely from that which he has passed
through. Behind him the hills are open, the sun blazes
down upon fields so large as to give an unenclosed
character to the landscape, the lanes are white, the
hedges low and plashed, the atmosphere colourless.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles, A Pure Woman |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from On the Duty of Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau: upon, even impose on themselves, for their own advantage.
It is excellent, we must all allow. Yet this government
never of itself furthered any enterprise, but by the
alacrity with which it got out of its way. It does not keep
the country free. It does not settle the West. It does not
educate. The character inherent in the American people has
done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done
somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in
its way. For government is an expedient, by which men would
fain succeed in letting one another alone; and, as has been
said, when it is most expedient, the governed are most let
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience |
