| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: holiday should be celebrated with flowers and spent in Cheyne Walk. A
pause followed; that, too, was natural; and Mrs. Milvain began to feel
that she laid herself open to a charge of selfishness if she stayed.
The mere presence of a young man had altered her disposition
curiously, and filled her with a desire for a scene which should end
in an emotional forgiveness. She would have given much to clasp both
nephew and niece in her arms. But she could not flatter herself that
any hope of the customary exaltation remained.
"I must go," she said, and she was conscious of an extreme flatness of
spirit.
Neither of them said anything to stop her. William politely escorted
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Time Machine by H. G. Wells: suggestion towards the solution of the economic problem that had
puzzled me.
`Here was the new view. Plainly, this second species of Man
was subterranean. There were three circumstances in particular
which made me think that its rare emergence above ground was the
outcome of a long-continued underground habit. In the first
place, there was the bleached look common in most animals that
live largely in the dark--the white fish of the Kentucky caves,
for instance. Then, those large eyes, with that capacity for
reflecting light, are common features of nocturnal things--
witness the owl and the cat. And last of all, that evident
The Time Machine |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Second Inaugural Address by Abraham Lincoln: than let the nation survive; and the other would accept war rather
than let it perish. And the war came.
One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed
generally over the Union, but localized in the Southern part of it.
These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew
that this interest was, somehow, the cause of the war. To strengthen,
perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the
insurgents would rend the Union, even by war; while the government claimed
no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.
Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration
which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause
Second Inaugural Address |
