| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Extracts From Adam's Diary by Mark Twain: horse all night as fast as he could go, hoping to get clear out of
the Park and hide in some other country before the trouble should
begin; but it was not to be. About an hour after sunup, as I was
riding through a flowery plain where thousands of animals were
grazing, slumbering, or playing with each other, according to their
wont, all of a sudden they broke into a tempest of frightful noises,
and in one moment the plain was in a frantic commotion and every
beast was destroying its neighbor. I knew what it meant--Eve had
eaten that fruit, and death was come into the world. ... The
tigers ate my horse, paying no attention when I ordered them to
desist, and they would even have eaten me if I had stayed--which
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The People That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs: which baffled me. Were there many passes or only one? I had
no way of knowing. I could but trust to chance. It never
occurred to me that Nobs had made the crossing at least once,
possibly a greater number of times, and that he might lead me
to the pass; and so it was with no idea of assistance that I
appealed to him as a man alone with a dumb brute so often does.
"Nobs," I said, "how the devil are we going to cross those cliffs?"
I do not say that he understood me, even though I realize that
an Airedale is a mighty intelligent dog; but I do swear that he
seemed to understand me, for he wheeled about, barking joyously
and trotted off toward the west; and when I didn't follow him,
The People That Time Forgot |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Wrecker by Stevenson & Osbourne: profuse allowance, and I might have lived (had I chosen) in the
Quartier de l'Etoile and driven to my studies daily. Had I done
so, the glamour must have fled: I should still have been but
Loudon Dodd; whereas now I was a Latin Quarter student,
Murger's successor, living in flesh and blood the life of one of
those romances I had loved to read, to re-read, and to dream
over, among the woods of Muskegon.
At this time we were all a little Murger-mad in the Latin
Quarter. The play of the _Vie de Boheme_ (a dreary, snivelling
piece) had been produced at the Odeon, had run an
unconscionable time--for Paris, and revived the freshness of the
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